Drive Partioning (Easy Question) [Resolved]

[RobDog888]

Is there any signifigant performance gains if you have one hard drive partioned
into two vs. having two physical drives?

[dglienna]

If useage was the same, i think you would lose performance, caused by increased access to various parts of the same disk, as opposed to having two read heads moving to different places.

[RobDog888]

Doh! I knew I had it backwards. But is the difference significant?

[dglienna]

prolly depends on useage. ummv type thing.

[Ideas Man]

My computing teacher always said that having a drive partitioned was more efficient that one big partition because it reduced the sector size or something. Whether it's true or not i dunno.

I'd go for the two drive approach if possible, it also makes backups easier and if you move the page file onto it, it makes your computer a little faster because it uses two drives and can do two things at once, not just one.

[RobDog888]

Update:
My boss (the owner) has just got his new computer finished, so I get his old
system, which can have two or more drives. Bad news is that he already
loaded the 80 Gb drive with XP, etc. So I guess all I can do is maybe
partition it using PQ Magic.

Guess its better then nothing. P4 1.8 768 Mbs of RDRAM. My old system was
a PIII 550 327 Mbs SDRAM.

So, would repartitioning the drive using PQ would be exactly the same as
using FDisk? I mean in the sense that if I had the system in the start and I
fdisked it before loaing the os vs. having the system loaded and using PQ to
divide it.

Thanks

[dglienna]

I had problems when the drive was used to its full extent. When you format only half of it, then it is easy to add another partition. I haven't used any other formatting programs, but have copied a drive elsewhere so that I could format/partition the original.

[Ideas Man]

Yeah, I spose you can. If you didn't really want to rely on it, you could always resize the system partition to the size you want and then use the partition utility in Windows to do the rest, or just use partition magic.

[RobDog888]

So your saying that Windows can resize my drive for me without using PQ? I never
had really played around with the Disk Management utility.

[Ideas Man]

So your saying that Windows can resize my drive for me without using PQ? I never
had really played around with the Disk Management utility.

Mmnno, it can only create partitions and stuff like that on unformatted space, Dynamic Disks are a little different and you might be able todo it with that. But for modifying an existing partition, you'll still need partition magic.

[dglienna]

that's what I thought, anyways.

[RobDog888]

Ok, thanks for all the input guys. I am going to repartion my drive using PQ
instead of reloading the entire thing. I dont think my boss would like it if I
spent the day installing the OS, Office, VS 6, and VS.NET.

Thanks again.