Does partitioning really improve performance? I always heard it did, and up until the past couple years it seemed like it did, but recently it doesn't appear to make a difference. I just bought a 40 GB drive (I know its not much by todays standards, but anyhow) and I want to put XP Pro on it, I was thinking of partitioning off 20 GB to the c drive and then 10 to the d and 10 to the e. But is there any real performance benefit when doing this? I mean, is the drive really going to access noticably slower if I simply use the whole drive as the c drive? Just wondering if this is an old wise tale or not.

Performance from HD depends on ATA speed, RPM speed and Cache memory of the HD. AM I WRONG?

~Death-Knight~

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Partioning helps in containing your data to a small portion of the disk thereby increasing access times. Make your C drive large enough for the OS and installed apps only + 1-2 gig for future apps. The rest of the drive should be for your data like mp3s, documents, stuff like that.

Creating a small partition to increase performance is called short stroking. Say you create a 3.5GB C drive, thats the size I use. For a 40GB drive, seeks within that partition are only accross 8.75% (3.5/40) of the drive MAX. Most are much smaller.

Seek + rotational latency = access time

1/3 stroke (a third of the disk) seek times for a typical drive are about 8ms. Rotational latency for a 7200RPM drive is about 4ms ( 60s/M / 7200RPM / 2) ~= 4ms

As you can see, seek times make up the majority of the access time, speeding that up by shortening the stroke distance speeds up access times drastically. Thats why smaller partitions give better performance and why you should contain all your apps/os on one small partition. The should start up faster.

hello

with xp-xp pro-xp corprate i would go with a minimun partion size of 5-7 gigs.
xp home 5 would be plenty.
m.e 4-5
98se 3-5
95 2-4
would be lots of room in most cases.
but you can go smaller. but when the next windows bloat pig comes out you may not have room lol

Partition your Page(swap) file on the first SEPERATE partition from everything else. This increaes your speed a lot because your pagefile is always being written and read. About a 20% increase.