Partitioning a HDD for gaming, few other related questions..

[Kiyuan98]

I currently have one 145gb 10k RPM Raptor in my PC I bought from Dell last year. And for awhile now I've been wanting to format my main HDD, but also partitioning a seperate section of my HDD so that I can install all my games on it (So I won't ever have to deal with re-installing/updating/etc. ever again.

My question is, what is the best program to do this with? Also any tips/heads up about this that I should know. Also one last question, does partitioning for games really help any? Either way I really need to do this since I like to format every 6-12 months or so for maintenance.

Thanks!

edit:

I read up on a few online articles that "PartitionMagic" is the best program to use for this. But I also read that if I am partitioning for gaming uses below.

"I would keep your installs of games on your System drive to avoid latency between disk controllers and store all your multimedia on a separate parition."

Is this true? Should I not put my installed games anywhere else besides "c:/" and not on a partition?

[Epical]

I always thought installed applications go in C:\ and data files (video, music, pictures, etc) go in extra partitions so you don't lose them in the case of an OS crash. I could be wrong... I (foolishly) didn't partition this drive when I got it.

[Cephius]

There is no reason to install games elsewhere. When you play a game, the operating system constantly has to read files from the installation directory, having that across a partition from the OS itself is counter-productive. Seperate partitions are usually used for data or media storage.

That being said, I don't everything on a partitioned drive because if the drive itself fails you're SOL. I use multiple drives and keep my media on a separate disk. I then back up both disks onto an external hard drive just in case either fails. Using a RAID array works well too.

Either way, Acronis Partition Magic is the best partitioning utility in the market. It has a great user interface, does the job quick, and has a ton of features.

In your case, if at all possible I'd partition the drive, keep your OS and installs on the C: drive, make another partition for your media, and then use some kind of backup utility to make an image of your hard drive incase something goes wrong.

[chewbar]

With an OS crash, you can still recover your data no matter where, assuming your hard disk is fine.... if the hard disk fails, then theres nowhere safe for your data unless it was a localized failure.
Personally, I like to keep the system files all on its own partition, games on its own, multimedia on its own, etc. Not only do it keep it organized, you could regularly defrag c: drive without defragging the entire hard disk.
Now if you're formatting regularly..... don't you still have to reinstall the games anyway? Unless you're backing up your registry which would partially defeat the purpose of the formatting....

[Shuemue]

Windows & installs on the raptor, all other files on a larger storage device.

[Amele]

and this is why SSD tech is going to be so very nice once the drives get bigger. (constant seek and throughput times across the whole volume because the physical characteristics don't change) partitions can literally be used purely for logical reasons without impacting the performance of the drive.


personally, I keep OS, media, and applications all on separate drives to increase throughput and reduce seek collisions - most modern controllers have excess available bandwidth and your choke point is disk performance. (assuming your cpu and ram(if DMA) are ready to handle the data when it comes in). I don't generally partition drives except for logical purposes - and that can be handled with disk quotas now anyway.

if you go with three separate drives, the OS drive should be the fastest (and presumably smallest). then the app drive should be balanced between speed and size, and the media drive should be the biggest (and probably slowest.)




w/re to installations and backing up the registry. one thing I used to do when I was administrating computers that I was expecting to reformat often was to export a copy of the registry before and after each application installation. I would then diff the files and extract all of the new keys that were created by the app. after recovering the OS I would simply run each of the app's personal .reg files to rebuild their specific registry entries. (of course, this only really works if you know your way around registry entries to begin with.)

[Norellicus]

I used to have multiple partitions to increase the total available capacity, but have since found that to be a huge hassle when those partitions start to outgrow themselves, so I just have a single ginormous partition that I perform regular backups of.

[Isiolia]

A long time ago I used partitions...I prefer to just use multiple drives now, usually one for OS/Apps, one for data. Now also an external for extra data and backup.