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Morning all.

We just did an upgrade of our digital survallince system. and I now have two, one year old WD1200BB 120 gig HHDs. My question is. How do you all partition them? NO NO I know how to do the job. But how do you set yours or recommend setting them. I was thinking of just leaving them at the full 120g, but recall others saying to brake them into multiply partitions works better. Does it make a difference? Have them both formatted at the full 120, but could make multiple. Just curious.

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Hey JSKY

I prefer splitting them up myself for various reasons.

1) If your main OS becomes unbootable or unreadable, your data and personal things can be safe on another partition

2) easier maintenance - you only need to defrag a small portion of the disk as they are required rather than having to defrag the entire 120G's

3) hiding info from prying eyes - if you have other users and don't want them accessing certain data you can put it into a partition and hide the drive from them

4) keep some space as Unallocated, not just Unused. This way if you need to resize or rebuild your setup, you can create a temporary partition that you can move stuff into while you resize.

I run anywhere from 4 to 9 partitions in my 120G's. I usually set my OS drives at 15 to 20G, then have a drive for my music at 20G, important program installers I save to another 5G drive and I have a 15G My Documents drive. I usually have a dual boot setup and sometimes a triple boot so I'm constatnly changing things up, and I keep 20G as Unallocated.

It takes time to get it setup with proper sizing so play around with it. I'm resizing things this week again.. ;)

Dave

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There are probably many opinions about this question (that seems pretty stupid, there are probably many opinions about almost all questions ;))!

Anyway, I would say it depends on what you intend on using them for. Will they just be for storage? Or will you be loading an OS on them?

If you're just using them as storage drives for media files (or whatever), I wouldn't worry about partitioning them.

From what I understand, there are some advantages to partitioning primary drives so that your data files are separated from the OS (in case you need to reinstall the OS, your data is unaffected). I don't think that holds true for program files (but I could be wrong).

Another advantage to having partitions is shorter defrags (assuming you don't just defrag all partitions sequentially vs. defragging one large partition).

Edit:

Once again my slow typing made me look like an idiot! I'm happy to see that Chappy made some of the same points I did!

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Once again my slow typing made me look like an idiot! I'm happy to see that Chappy made some of the same points I did!

LOL!!

Not like an idiot Rob, just a slow typist...and if you're slower than me...you ARE slow!!

;):D

Dave

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Thanks for the input. I think I'll leave the secondary whole and split the primary into smaller parts, you both made good points with the OS. and keeping other files safe.

Thanks

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A friend of mine has some partitions that range from 1gb to about 5gb. His reasoning is to have him burn off data as that partition is filled. Of course he has larger partitions for testing s'ware before installing and using on primary. One partition has a default download folder. Games on one.

M

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