Storage Solutions 1 TB Partition ? How ?

S

saqib_khan

Adept
Hi All,

I've just bought 1 TB Hitachi Hard drive. This will be my new drive and I won't be using my old 160 GB HD. So now, all data will be transferred to new one.

I want to know whats the best method to partition this new one. For now, I will be connecting this new HD and then I will partition it, and transfer the data, by copy and paste.

In this new HD, I will be installing Win 7 64 bit and Ubuntu 64 bit. What size of partition should I be doing ? What I think is:

c: 200 GB (for program files and My Documents) - For Windows 7 64 bit
d: 400 GB (data)
e: 300 GB (games)
f: 100 GB (for Ubuntu 64 bit)

Am I going right ? Also I will need to prepare a swap partition for ubuntu, so will create that from 100 GB only. Is that ok ?

Any suggestions/comments appreciated :)
 
Re: 1 TB Patition ? How ?

Mate better make a 40-50GB partition for the OS drive and give the rest to the other drives. Why is 200gb necessary for win 7 x64, the installation will take some 10-12gb space and even with all your favorite application the total might come upto 25-30gb. So no use of 200 gb.

If you are planning to play game, then install the games in a separate drive other then the OS drive.

My suggetsion
50GB - win 7
600gb - movies and music
200gb - games

remaining for linux, a linux geek can give a better answer regarding that.
 
Re: 1 TB Patition ? How ?

Use Windows XP CD for partitioning, it is simple and best method. As CA50 mentioned, keep atleast 50GB as primary partition for OS.

60GB - OS
50GB - Softwares
350GB - Games
250GB - Movies
50GB - Music
30GB - Pics
50GB - Ubuntu
50GB - Essential Data
 
Thanks for the advise. I am going to install Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit. Hope it runs well. I need to view some tutorials first on how to install it. lol. Hope I doesn't screw up anything.
 
^^if you are new to linux, then just install ubuntu inside windows just like regular windows application. Use the tool wubi for installing inside windows. It is the fastest,, safest and the most easiest of all the mothods :)
 
C: - 50GB for WIN7

D: - 35gb for UBUNTU

E: - 600gb for MOVIES

F: - 125gb for GAMES and MULTIMEDIA

G: - 125GB for SOFTWARES and EXTRA THINGS
 
While making a partition remember to allocate the beginning 15% of your drive to the slowest OS. In your case it's Win7. I'm saying this because it's in the short stroke area of your hard drive and runs the fastest.

The total partition brake up should be like this :

*WIN 7 : 139GB. ( use it for all installed programs / games / applications avoid installing apps/programs/games on a second partition if it's on the same drive ) (fastest 15% part of your Hard Disk)

*Ubuntu 64: 93GB only. (second fastest 10% part of your hard disk)

*Storage Partition : 699 GB only. (game iso's/ movies / mp3's / software's installers basically all your storage needs)

Looks like no-one told you but you have only 931 GB to allocate.

Avoid from making any further partitions as it might slow up your hard disk even more.
 
@naveen chauhan , mate are you sure of that thing, your theory is application only on case in optical disc, the HDD spins at 7200rpm so basically the transfer rate is more or less same along the whole HDD, and not like that it is slow in the first dew gb and fast at the remaining one.

139gb for win 7 is utter waste, a 50 drive is enough, and IMHO it is better to install games in partition other the the OS one. While loading and playing a game, both the game files and OS/system files are accessed and keeping both of them in the same partition decreased the performance a bit.

Similar is the case with 93gb, why to waste the space. basically he will use the OS for multimedia or something so instead of alloting 93gb for ubuntu, be can just allot 40-50gb and add the rest to the multimedia section.

About the 931gb case, everyone know that thing, so we have helped him by rounding it to zero. OP can do the rest calculation

PS: Please correct me if i am wrong, regarding the hdd speed.
 
Use the win7 cd for partitioning.

50gb for win7 and installed apps.
900gb for data and storage.
50gb for ubuntu.

Keep it simple :)
 
@CA50 - Naveen Chauhan is correct... we should always install our Primary OS in the 1st partition i.e the nearest one to the Mechanical Head...

@OP - And if you just want to learn Linux and not plan use it for serious applications, you can either use Sun VBOX or VMWare.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you are NOT going to use torrents
30 GB - Win 7 - Just OS,Office (20 for these and additional 10 if you plan ti install Visual Studio).
125 GB - Programs and Games (Assuming you would install 3 games max at a time)

If you are going to use torrents
725 GB - Storage( Games Setup Files, Movies, Music, EBooks)
50 GB - Torrents(as it involves more Write Operations and even if it gets corrupted down the line, it will be at the end of the disk meaning lower damage)
If you are NOT going to use torrents
200 GB - Music (as you will be accessing it more often)
576 GB - Movies, Setup Files, Etc
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you are going to install Ubuntu
30 GB - Win 7 - Just OS,Office (20 for these and additional 10 if you plan to install Visual Studio).
125 GB - Programs and Games (Assuming you would install 3 games max at a time)
626 GB - Movies, Music
150 GB - Ubuntu(you can either create this as an Primary Partition or if you want two drives for Ubuntu, then make it as an Extended Partition)
 
@carbonn , i know about that because 1st partition holds the mbr and also it is the primary partition, rest are all logical or extended partition.

But is it for the speed factor? HDD doesn't follow the optical disc method, do they??
 
Well, the application of the above said 'faster partition' can be found on Intel RAID0 configurations, where the software uses the beginning 'faster' part of 2 HDDs in RAID for a much better performance compared to standard raid configuration.

Apart from that I've myself experienced this issue as earlier I used keep only 1 partition, writing speeds used to drop from ~40MB/s to 20MB/s after filling up of > 45% of the HDD(same performance difference was confirmed for a 4year old Hitachi7200rpm HDD, 2 X 2 year old WD640AAKS HDD and a new 2TB HDD(most affected) ).

Basically things start getting slower as you start reading/writing towards the end(>50%) of the drive. I also found out that files fragment more when the HDD reaches the end.

I think 139GB Primary partition is just enough keeping in mind the trend nowadays followed by games(average are about 12GB per game), softwares etc.

Well, I cant say much about Linux but I can definitely say it will never fragment as much as a WinOS. So it's up to him to reduce the partition size or not, I suggested 93 GB as it was fitting the % criteria perfectly and also because he mentioned that he needs 100GB for it. Else I think 32 GB is more than enough for Ubuntu 64.

P.S. - I hope most of you know that if you create partition on a drive reading and writing events between different partitions take more time as compared to a single partition or separate physical HDDs.
 
CA50 said:
@carbonn , i know about that because 1st partition holds the mbr and also it is the primary partition, rest are all logical or extended partition.

But is it for the speed factor? HDD doesn't follow the optical disc method, do they??
Click to expand...

The outer edge of the HDD is the fastest one. The primary partition automatically takes the outer edge and hence is faster with less effective seek time. Also, the outer tracks have high linear velocity means that more data can pass under the read/write heads per unit time.
 
CA50 said:
@carbonn , i know about that because 1st partition holds the mbr and also it is the primary partition, rest are all logical or extended partition.

But is it for the speed factor? HDD doesn't follow the optical disc method, do they??
Click to expand...
It's because of the fact that the lesser the head has to travel to read the data, the faster will be the performance. The outer cylinders are written first and are faster to access than the inner cylinders.

Due to this fact, the benchmarks score will differ if you run them when the disk is near to empty and when the disk is near to full.
 
Thanks mates for clearing my views, i know these stuffs, but didn't know that the same applies in case of magnetic disk
 
carbonn, you're partly right but pretty wrong about the nearest the mechanical head bit. the head(s) are fixed to an armature which can cover the entire surface of the platter. there is no part of the disk which is 'nearer' the head. Hard drives spin at a constant speed (the 7200rpm etc. we see in the specs) and this is called constant angular velocity (CAV). which means, as muzux2 mentioned, that the outer tracks are moving at a faster speed wrt. the heads and therefore can transfer data faster. since the partitions are created from the outer edge towards the inside, the first few partitions will always be faster than the last ones.

also, CA50 mentioned something incorrect about games and OS on the same partition. if you install games on the same physical hard drive as the OS, it doesn't really matter if they're in the same partition or different ones. the same head(s) has to seek to the data thereby making the speed issue redundant. of course the earlier bit about faster at the outer tracks applies, so if the games are installed in a partition near the inside, i.e. a later partition than the first, it will actually be slower in terms of transfer speed. what really can boost speeds is installing games on a separate physical hard drive from the OS drive. or buy an ssd.

personally, i have my data, games, media, 'my documents' and 'desktop' folders on a separate partition from the OS ones. in case of an OS crash or other catastrophic failure, you don't have to worry about recovering your precious data. just reinstall the OS and apps and you're good to go. which in my case is in the form of a ghost image, so recovery takes about a minute.

edit: @CA50 mbr has nothing to do with speed, once bootup is complete, the mbr is history. also, we can have up to 4 primary partitions on one hard drive. i never use extended/logical partitioning.
 
ok thanks for all your suggestion. Here is what I did:

c: 100 GB

d: system reserved 100 MB (now what to do for this ?)

e: 300 GB

f: 300 GB

g: 300 GB

But I don't understand this, why is my D:, whenever I click on it, it says the drive is not formatted. Can I just format this drive ? I did some google for this and found that MBR and other system files are stored in this 100 MB for recovery purposes. Any help here :)

Oh and for now, I have not installed ubuntu. Don't want to mess up anything now. Will learn first and later on try it.
 
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