Partitions & Drives Affect Performance?

[Hap]

When partitioning during a clean install of windows xp home, how large should the be that holds the operating system?

Also, I read in windows help & support that dividing memory between multiple partitions/drives (?) can increase performance.  Is this so?

hap

[Krusty]

I don't know how to answer your first question. I always use 1 partition so I've never run into problems.

Putting swap on another partition can help, if that partition is on a separate drive. Your HD can only read/write so fast. If you have 2 you can read/write as fast to 2 separate drives. This is like a RAID. You can get faster speed because it's read/writing as fast as it can, but doing it 5 times simultaneously (<-- that's just an example).

So if your swap is on your normal partition and windows needs it, Windows will access that swap. Read/write is the slowest point (okay, second slowest, input is the slowest) in the computing process. Say you're already doing stuff on the computer, the HD is active and all. If you're in a game and things are being swapped you might run into a few slow spots. Not only does the HD have to read/write other things, but now it also has to swap out memory to the HD.

But if the HD is already in use, or already at its peak read/write, simply putting the swap on another partition won't help. It's still on the same drive, the heads are still  going around the disc as fast as they can. You can't make 'em go any faster. This means that if the partitions are all on one HD, separating the SWAP partition won't buy you any speed.

However if the swap partition is on a separate HD (if you have 2 or more) then you might speed things up a bit by separating the swap out. That way if the data partition is on "HD 1" and the swap is on "HD 2," then you can still swap things out even if "HD 1" is busy and is already at full speed.

I probably didn't make that very clear. If so, I'm sorry. I'll try to re-word it if I didn't make any sense.

[Hap]

Krusty, your response was just fine.  Thanks for the input.  I've not been flying for quite awhile and the computer is getting long in the tooth.  I figure it's time I learn about partitioning.

I've build two CPU's not because I wanted to, but because it was less expensive.  Hence, I've never "gotten into" all the in's and out's of possible configurations.  Even the most elementary ones.

Gathering some data now about parts etc . . ..  There must be some place out there that for a nominal fee will assemble a computer.  I don't enjoy it.  I can do it, but it's not really my longsuit.

hap

[Krusty]

Well, here's a tip then.

When I upgraded my PC I was on a tight budget, so I kept my 6-year-old IDE 20GB hard drive. It ran with 1 partition and all my stuff on it. It was okay. However I didn't have enough storage.

So I got a SATA 1.5GB/s drive (120GB or something) and used it. It was set up with just 1 partition as well.

With the SATA drive my access time is way down. The driver reads and writes MUCH faster than my old drive. Windows XP fresh install was done in a matter of 15 minutes or so.

I guess this is related to swap times. If your drive reads/writes faster, it can swap out the memory faster. If you have an older PC, a hard drive upgrade might help you out. If your PC can't handle the newer HD connectors (ATA, SATA, PATA) then you might run into problems.

Something to consider.


P.S. there are places that assemble PCs for you. Only they want you go get all your parts from them. They also charge for the honor. The trick is finding one you know and trust. I know of none that fit either category so I build my own PCs now.

[SkyGnome]

I personally now use a couple of mid-sized partitions for games and web cache.  Both of these types of apps are a massive cause of fragmentation and locality problems - the web cache is constantly creating/deleting files, and I typically install/uninstall/update games much faster than normal apps.  By doing this, my C drive needs defragging 1/10th the time, and I can do fun stuff like copy a game's install folder to another partition, delete it on the original partition, and then copy it back for a defrag that fixes locality as well as fragmentation.  Defragging also takes much less time than trying to defrag a single 100+gig partition that has ten trillion files on it.

[MAG1C]

Originally posted by Hap
When partitioning during a clean install of windows xp home, how large should the be that holds the operating system?

Also, I read in windows help & support that dividing memory between multiple partitions/drives (?) can increase performance.  Is this so?

hap

I'm not sure if partitioning increases performance (seems like it should but I've never tested it).  

The reason I have my hard drive partitoned is to simplify backups.  My drive C is 10 gig.  Its mainly for my operating system.  The problem is, a lot of programs, even when you tell them to install on another drive, add files to drive C.  Anyway, I can store a mirror image of drive C on one or two DVD disks.  My drive D is personal stuff - correspondance, spreadsheets, photographs, financial stuff.  Drive E is mostly for Aces High.  Drive F is misc.  My computer is programmed to create mirror image backups overnight on drive G on weekends and I copy the image files to DVDs sometime during the week.  I keep three generations of my backups.

I've used this system for a number of years.  When an experiment, I test a lot of progams for my PC User Group, messes up my computer I can quickly restore it using my backups.  In the event that my hard drive fails, it happened to me once or twice, I can install a new hard drive and recover everything in a few hours without having to reinstall all my applications programs.

[llama]

Agree with Magic:

All my computers have at least two partitions:

The OS and all the programs go on the first.

The "My Documents" folder, and other personal data files, go on the second.

Then I use Norton Ghost (or equivalent) to back up the entire first partition onto a file on the second partition.

I do this at least once a month, or whenever I am about to try out any new software package. (Don't forget that I review software for a living.)

This won't protect against hard drive failure. It protects agaist unwanted system changes, virus and spyware, and so forth.

If you are also planning on putting on Linux, I leave at least 7 gigs extra space for a 1 GB linux swap partition and a 6 gig ext3 partition. The latest Ubuntu Linux takes up 3 GB.

None of this has any real effect on performance. Just peace of mind...

-Llama

[Sundowner]

I use this tweek to force my "Page File" to my system RAM (No Page file on disk at all) As far as I know this has to be the fastest "Page File" access you can have.
Be aware, W98 and WME use "Swap File" and W2K and WXP use "Page File".
I recommend this tweek for 1Gb Sys RAM minimum.

Regards
Sun


This works for XP and 2000--
User-mode and kernel-mode drivers and kernel-mode system code is usually written to be either pageable or non-pageable. In cases where drivers or system code is pageable, you can use the following registry entry to keep this pageable code in RAM, but this is only advisable on systems with extremely large amounts of RAM.
If your system has enough physical memory performance will increase if the operating system does not page it self to disk. The best way to make sure is to load all of your applications and use the task manager(press Control-Alt-Delete) and click the performance tab. Your physical RAM should be greater then the Peak Commit Charge by at least 64MB.

To manually edit the registry. Modify HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Con
trol\Session Manager\Memory Management and set the following value DisablePagingExecutive=1.
1=enable---Disables page file to disk and uses ram only
0=disable---Enables page file to disk

[Krusty]

I'm going to try that out. I've made a system restore point (just in case ). I've got 1.5GB single channel RAM. I'll let you know if I see improvement.

[Clutz]

I'm am going to try that too Sundowner when I get some more ram. Thank you. Also, I found this from microsoft and I think its good info on the subject of page files and partitions. I learned what a page file was two days ago. I'm Trying my best to learn. Hope this helps somebody.  

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314482/

[Krusty]

Well first impression is that it's noticably faster. Or maybe it's noticably quieter (that is, maybe I'm noticing the absence of HD churning, rather than actual speed?)

[Sundowner]

Originally posted by Krusty
Well first impression is that it's noticably faster. Or maybe it's noticably quieter (that is, maybe I'm noticing the absence of HD churning, rather than actual speed?)

RAM paging should be much faster than HD paging.

1)The memory transfer bus rate is faster than the disk data transfer bus.(pretty sure it is anyways.)

2)The Page data is being clocked into the RAM cache at each DMA clock cycle. As opposed to Disk paging, which requires the physical HD Read/Write head to "fly" to the appropriate physical HD location. This mechanical process of storing data is much slower than the electronic process that takes place with RAM R/W operations.

*Sidenote..As flash ram gets cheaper and cheaper, watch for "Flash HDs" in the future --notebooks already are using this to some extent due to their high physical space needs. The day will come when "Flash RAM" will be the primary storage media in PCs (After M/B system RAM). Imagine an "instant on" PC boot..the OS will be located on the flash ram, along with everything else we now keep on our outdated HDs.

Opening task manager and clicking on the "Performance" tab will give some quick info on your Page File operations.

Regards
Sun

[Sundowner]

Originally posted by Clutz
I'm am going to try that too Sundowner when I get some more ram. Thank you. Also, I found this from microsoft and I think its good info on the subject of page files and partitions. I learned what a page file was two days ago. I'm Trying my best to learn. Hope this helps somebody.  

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314482/

Hope it helps.
Thanks for the link.

Regards
Sun