There are those that like to keep their hard drive as one big primary
active partition = C drive,  ... and then use directories (folders) to
categorize the drives into major areas like Programs, Data, Media, etc. And
there are others who like to create a primary active partition for the
operating system, and then an extended partition full of logical drives to
divide up areas of the hard drive.

I like logical drives because it seems more orderly to me, and separate
partitions can isolate fragmentation. Your computer sees these partitions
as separate drives, and you can have as many logical drives as there are
letters in the alphabet. However you can only have four Primary partitions
on a hard drive, and only one active one will be seen at a time. Logical
drives are partitions that are <within> a primary extended partition.

Separate partitions makes it easy for me to backup and restore a category.
Troubleshooting can also be easier if you can isolate a particular problem
to a partition.  The only time I would tell you that you <should> use
partitions, is if you will be installing multiple operating systems. It is
a good idea to keep multiple operating systems on their own partitions.

As long as you're using FAT32 or NTFS ( NT4 or Win2K), you don't have to
worry about cluster efficiency. Never setup  a FAT16 =  FAT partition
bigger then one GB because the waste is enormous. With FAT the cluster size
gets bigger as the size of the partition gets bigger.

You do want to make sure that your swap file is on the first partition of
the drive. This is the fastest area of the drive. If you have two physical
IDE hard drives installed on two separate channels (Primary and Secondary),
then put the swap file on the first partition of the second hard drive so
that your computer can access the operating system and the swap file
simultaneously. I am assuming that the two hard drives are similar in
performance. As a general rule you want the swap file on your fastest hard
drive.

Partitions or directories is largely a matter of personal taste, and how
you like to use your computer. However one thing you can count on is that
you will fill that 30 GB drive up in a year, and you will wonder where all
the space went!

Rode
The NOSPIN Group



>I am upgrading a Win 98 SE machine with a large hard drive, 30
>Gigabytes.  Sector size presumably increases with the size of a drive.  In
>this case, an upgrade to the BIOS would allow a single primary drive to
>occupy the full 30 GB.  There is the option of dividing the drive into
>smaller logical drives.  Does anyone have any suggestions or guidelines as
>to whether efficiency of the drive in speed of read/write, retrieval would
>be increased or decreased by dividing the drive or not, what the optimum
>sector size would be by adjusting the logical drive size, etc.?  I am going
>from the world of worrying whether my former small HD would hold all my
>programs to the world of not being able to imagine ever filling a 30 GB
>drive.
>David E. Ralph

         PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
                     visit our download web page at:
                  http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml