On 15 Dec 2001, at 20:53, William Closure wrote:

> I have read about people partitioning hard drives, and I'm trying
> to understand the benefits, as well as the down side.  On the
> upside, separate partitions could be made for each person who uses
> the computer, thus isolating that person's files (although it would
> be just as easy to create directories for each person.)  And,
> likewise, those isolated files could be more easily deleted,
> copied, etc..  And, I guess you could defrag each drive
> individually.  But, does it do anything to improve day to day
> operations? And, what are the downsides?  Any tutorials out there
> about the pros and cons?
>
> William Closure

  There are four basic benefits of splitting a hard drive up into
partitions:

1.  If you will be running multiple OSes on the machine, you may
prefer to have them use different file systems or drive formats.
Separate partitions lets you do that.  (And if they use the same
format, it may be one with a small size limit, such as FAT16, so you
may want them to be separate partitions anyway.)

2.  There are performance advantages to a statically allocated
contiguous swap file, and this is most easily achieved by putting it
in a separate partition.  (Of course, for *best* performance, it
should be on a separate drive on its own controller.)

3.  It's convenient to be able to reformat and reload the OS, and
you'll get the most benefit from this if the OS and user application
data are easily separated.  Putting them on separate partitions works
pretty well.

4.  Some formats -- FAT16 especially -- cope woth larger and larger
drives by allocating space for files in larger and larger chunks.
This means that, on average, each file is half a chunk larger than it
really needs to be.  On a drive with lots of files, a large chunk
size can mean substantial wasted space.  Since the partition size
dictates the minimum chunk size, one may be able to fit more files on
a drive with less wasted space if it is slit up into smaller
partitions.

David Gillett

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