Storage Solutions Need advice for proper partitioning.

If you have multiple disks, There is no need for partitioning.

But if you have a single disk as in the case of a laptop, I would recommend partitioning into at least two volumes. Equal size partitions is good enough. I would strongly recommend against the strategy of small partition sizes for OS. It doesn't help with anything these days. Keep at least 250~300 GB for OS. For example, I install any development tools, MS office etc. into their default install path's which would be in the OS volume in Program Files. If the OS install goes for a toss, you would end up needing to reinstall most of this software anyway. The other partition can be used for storing documents and any other files and anything that you want to keep separate and safe. If the OS crashes and you cannot recover, all you need to do will be to clean reinstall OS. You don't have to go about looking for a means to copy the important stuff first or install on top of the existing files so you don't lose any thing.
 
Thanks. So most of you have given me an idea about ideal partition. Can you share a video, article or a link which I can follow to make this partition? It's going to be only 2 partitions and @Lord Nemesis has suggested above.

I've googled a couple of links on tomshardware and cnet, just want to be sure about how to do it properly.
 
creative420 said:
TNk25

Alright. this is all very technical to me. So, do I partition the disk or not? It's a 1TB disk, currently in this state: http://imgur.com/a/TNk25
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The current partitioning is good enough. don't do anything. I suggest against changing anything because if you repartition; you will have reinstall OS, reinstall software and reconfigure everything. this will require couple of hours and I think its just wasting time so that you get some psychological satisfaction.

Again that 980 MB recovery partition seems to be windows OS backup. you wont be able to reinstall OS if you delete that.
 
booo said:
I suggest against changing anything because if you repartition; you will have reinstall OS, reinstall software and reconfigure everything. this will require couple of hours and I think its just wasting time so that you get some psychological satisfaction.
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IMO, that is couple of hours well spent on a new laptop since it not only gives "psychological satisfaction", but also helps avoid a lot of hassle when you do end up in a situation where you need to clean install the OS again. You won't have to spend time trying to copy 300~400 GB of important stuff instead of quickly restoring the laptop to working condition.

I faced this situation twice myself. Once with my sisters laptop which is partitioned and quickly restoring windows after a OS corruption took 15 min and without any hassle. The other time was with my cousins laptop and there was a single partition and I had to pull out the HDD out of the laptop and spend a night copying about 350 GB worth of stuff before I could do a clean reinstall of OS on it. So, yes, it does make a difference. Obviously, it doesn't help if the HDD itself goes for a toss, but IMO, the probability of the former happening is much higher than the whole HDD going bad.

Of course one other alternative to that is to buy an extra external disk and use that for storing files or take regular backups.
 
Lord Nemesis said:
where you need to clean install the OS again
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See, we have completely opposite ideologies. usually you dont need to reinstall windows OS. for example, my current gaming rig is 2.5 years old never "reinstalled" windows. currently runs Windows insider preview. transported from Australia to US in a shipping container that took 4 months apart from the other type of abuse that I put it through.
second is my work laptop, runs windows 7 (because of work restrictions). 3 years old. third, my personal laptop which again runs windows insider preview. almost an year old.

Most of the times repair windows works, and if it doesnt you can simply reinstall windows and it re-installs it moves all the windows stuff to something like windows.old and then you can remove it after the system comes back. The point being, you dont need to format/clean install windows and lose all the data.
 
Reinstall over existing partition is not a completely dependable solution. There are still situations where nothing but format helps. What do you think Microsoft recommends when somebody says they have issues after or while trying to reinstall over existing windows. Do a clean install?

To be honest, I do have to say that OS corruption is very rare for me as far as my own desktop is concerned and I think has happened only 4 times in last 20 years of computer usage. 2 of those instances was with Windows 7 and in the first instance, repair didn't work and attempt to reinstall also resulted in issues and I had do a to clean install after formatting the disk, However, in the second instance, reinstall did work out well and I am presently working from that install.

For me, it didn't matter either way because I have multiple HDD in my system and apart form some docs on desktop, I don't keep anything on the OS volume (SSD) that needs to be backed up. Still, while making a suggestion to somebody else, I would like to suggest the fairly safe option. A small amount of hassle on a fresh laptop taken in a planned manner could help avoid hassles at an inconvenient time.

This makes even more sense with the single button recovery systems provided in newer laptops these days that can restore the OS volume to a fresh state at the touch of a button. If you have all the important stuff in a different volume, you can just push a button and get the system up and running again in a few minutes instead of fiddling around with reinstall and hoping that it works.

I am not saying that all hell will break lose if he doesn't create two partitions. But that its definitely a good idea if he can do it. In some cases, you could get that option right from the vendor. Recently, my sister (in US) got a new Lenovo Yoga 910. I suggested her to get it customized with with a Samsung 950 Pro and getting the same partitioned into two volumes and Lenovo did it for her.
 
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Haven't bothered with partitioning in a long time (including during a brief stint as sysadmin). There is no ideal partitioning scheme. All artificial size limits end up becoming a nuisance in the long run. I remember helping a friend whose Vista installation filled up his (IIRC) 400 GB partition.Unless you are certain that your movie collection will never exceed 250GB, you do not need that 250GB partition called movies.

If you are worried about a reinstall in case of a OS crash, don't. Implement a proper backup strategy; format, install and restore.
 
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Perhaps I'll throw my two cents in here as a data recovery engineer. Here's a few facts you can go on.

All spinning disk hard drives do order the LBA arrangement such that the lower ranges are on the outer platter tracks. These tracks do read nominally faster (~20-30% faster sequential read) than the inner tracks do. However, most typical OSs also write data in such a way that the lower LBA ranges will be favored over the higher LBAs. So whether you create a separate OS partition or not the fact remains that your OS will be installed in the lowest LBA ranges. The only difference which might come up is programs which are installed later on after the drive is getting quite full. These programs might get installed in the higher LBA range and thus could take a theoretical 20% hit in load time. I say "theoretical" because, in reality, the biggest limiting factor of program load times from a HDD is actually the seek time, not sequential read speed. Program loading requires a lot of 4K and smaller reads which are generally equally slow on a HDD regardless of what track they are actually saved on.

Personally, I'd never bother to create a separate OS partition from the DATA partition. It's 100x more likely that this partition will itself become a problem when one or the other partition is found to be too small and you end up needing to move around data to just make it all fit.
 
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