Dave Ralph <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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.  Thank you.

You don't mention any other details about the system, so it is hard to say for
sure.

Any modern system (in the last 2 to 3 years) should be able to utilize the full
capacity without problems. You also fail to say how your existing drive is
setup, or what size it is. If it has any partitions over 2Gb, then you are
already using FAT32. Certainly Win98SE supports FAT32, so having a single
partition of 30Gb is not a problem.

About performance, if you split it up into several driver letters (partitions)
of 2Gb or less, then you can use FAT16, which has slightly lower overhead. On
newer systems with P-II or P-III processors, this difference isn't worth
mentioning. Also, the hassle of having a bunch of drive letters isn't worth it
either.

I would stick with a single 30Gb partition for the most part, just make sure you
defrag on a regular basis.


--
Russ Poffenberger               Engineering Specialist
Schlumberger Technologies ATE   DOMAIN: [log in to unmask]
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