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What's the performance trade-off with partitioning a SATA drive?

I'm sticking a new 200GB (or so) SATA drive in my workstation. What is the tradeoff between number of partitions and performance? Will multiple partitions offer noticeable speed improvement?

Dave's Answer:

Honestly, this isn't my area of expertise, but fortunately my friend and colleague John Goodman offered his assistance with this question, and here's what he had to say:

Well, I believe I covered this area quite well in my "Hard Disk Secrets" book back in 1993, (You were all born then, at least, weren't you? [smile] )

In addition to the issue of cluster size, you must consider the minimum size needed in the "main" partition where the OS and many other Windows programs end up writing most of their configuration data, etc., versus the space needed for all the temporary files (which I usually put on a different logical--and often a different physical--drive), and the space needed for documents and other such files.

Also, in addition to making backups of discrete sets of files a tad easier and also making finding things you've filed away considerably easier, having multiple partitions may keep you from running into some arcane upper limit to the practical size of a partition that a given file system can manage. (The FAT variants were particularly prone to failure if the partition size was too large--even though the formal specification of the relevant variant might claim an ability to handle even a larger size
partition.)

I've also heard the comment that with 200GB who cares how inefficient you are--note that file sizes are growing by leaps and bounds with the continued rise of digital multimedia. So today's 200GB drive is very likely about as packed with stuff as the 20MB drive of a couple of decades back. True, the slack space (empty portions of clusters) isn't likely to be as big a fraction of the space, but the space itself is still quite valuable--just in larger chunks.

Aside: I have found over the years that instead of abandoning the very old files and programs I used to keep on my older, much smaller hard drives, I have instead--each time I got a new, much larger hard drive--found it easy to just copy over all the contents of those earlier drives and tuck in some "virtual corner" of the new hard drive. Then I could take out the older, smaller drive(s) and abandon them before they actually died. This lets me get at even the oldest of those files, should I even feel the need. And the cost of the space they occupy is nearly vanishingly small!

Back when I was first writing about all this I was a great fan of PowerQuest's Partition Magic program for managing partitions (and for changing their sizes without loss of the data within each one). But since PQ was bought by Symantec bad things have happened and I can no longer recommend them.

Acronis has a set of programs that apparently a very good alternative to the old PowerQuest programs, and I just recently learned that there is currently a "holiday" bundle--soon to be renamed as a "winter" bundle, or some such--of three Acronis programs (Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0, Acronis True Image 9.0, and Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 9.0) for a bargain price of only $59 at The UserGroup Store.

I've used their True Image program (in version 8) for about a year, now, and I've been quite pleased with it. I've not (yet) used the other two products, but it appears to me that they do know what they are doing, so I'm planning to get that bundle and I expect to be quite pleased by them all.

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Comments

Personally, I used to partition drives into multiple pieces, and Partition Magic's big advertising push is that it can divide a disk into lots of little pieces.

But ultimately, I was using Partition Magic over and over to make one partition smaller so that I could make another partition (usually the System or C partition) bigger. When one of your many small partitions runs out of room, it's a pain in the ***.

If you don't have Partition Magic or Acronis, you need to buy them or use one of the hard-to-use free Unlix-based bootable CDs that can resize partitions. Nowadays, with large hard drives, the sector size loss isn't much of an issue with NTFS-formatted disks (or even FAT32X), so there's much less of an issue as the "sector overhang" which could be significant back in the FAT-format days.

As for those "arcane upper limits" that the article mentions, those limits don't exist any more with modern computers and modern operating systems. There used to be a 512-MB disk size limit, too, but thankfully that's gone.

I strongly recommend not partitioning your drive at all. My computer has an 80-GB "C" drive; there's a folder called Data where all the data lives, and my second drive is a backup for everything on my first drive -- operating system, installed programs, and data. This is a much better way to go in 2006. I don't have to resize any partitions any more.

Posted by: David Walker at January 8, 2006 4:24 PM

I wouldn't say that there isn't any benefit at all to having partitioned drives. Personally, I still use partitioned drives for my Swapfile (virtual memory) storage.. why? Because the swapfile can fragment your windows partition to bits.. it's contantly creating and deleting files, so having your swapfile on a different partition helps a little. I wouldn't say it's a huge performance bonus, you might not notice it at all, it's just something I like to do for peace of mind I guess.

You do this by simply creating a small partition for whatever size of swapfile you intend on using (I generally have a swapfile that's three times the size of my installed RAM), then right click My Computer (Windows XP) - Properties -> Advanced Tab -> Performance Section -> Settings -> Advanced Tab -> Virtual Memory Section -> Change. This will take you to the virtual memory management screen. At the top is a list of the possible partitions to use, C being the default. Pick your new partition, click "Custom Size" and set your minimum and maximum. I generally have my max set at 3 times my installed RAM, and my minimum set at 1.5 times my installed RAM.

At any rate, you probably won't see a performance gain, but you will have the peace of mind knowing that you won't need to defrag your hard drive much, if at all.

Posted by: NutDaily.com at August 16, 2006 10:11 PM

I've been toying around with this concept for several years now. I was also a fan of PQ PMagic, until Norton took over. I went to Acronis shortly thereafter. Brilliant products (haven't tried the Privacy suite though).

As for the partitioning theory? Well... I've personally noticed that with each partition comes a performance overhead. Windows takes somewhat longer to boot, and find its files when you go digging through Explorer. I guess what it really comes down to, is how you like to do things.

The nice thing about partitioning a drive (any drive), is that you can control the exact parameters. I experimented with changing the cluster sizes of my C: drive, just to see what would happen. Found out that's not the bes thing to do. Works great for storage paritions though, such as pen drives, external hard drives (recommend NTFS@512b clusters).

Smaller paritions do not fragment as easily or as fast. The reason is because of the way that Windows writes its files, which is pretty much WHEREEVER. At the very least, it makes defragging process a bit easier, because there isn't so much space to manage for the one drive. On the other hand... it also makes file management harder. Where did I put that file?

I personally recommend that you use and external drive as a backup, and use one parition on your computer. It's generally faster, better performance, and easier file management.

Posted by: Jason at March 21, 2007 11:28 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

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I do have a comment, now that you mention it!