Does drive partitioning weaken the CPU at all?

[The Divide]

Always had my main drive partitioned for formatting purposes. Recommend it

Now I have a new drive which is big and I dont really see the need to have the main windows drive partitioned

I will leave it as it is unless it takes up a little bit of CPU having your windows drive partitioned? If it hardly does anything I will it as it is and have a Temp partition for random unorganised files. What ya think

Much appreciated

Danny

[TechMouse]

unless it takes up a little bit of CPU having your windows drive partitioned?
Pretty sure it doesn't.

Partition stuff would be an implementation detail of the HD controller - nothing to do with the CPU at all.

[Mirsha]

It'll all be handled by the drive controller so it won't impact your CPU performance at all, and if it does it'll most likely be a completely negligible difference anyway.

As for partioning I'd recommend you really don't. Marking of a 1gig partition for the Windows temp file makes a hell of a lot of sense, as it avoids the temp file cluttering up and fragmenting your drive.

Apart from that I would only recomend paritioning a drive if you intend to have two different OS installs on the same hard drive. There is no real benefit to partitioning your drive beyond that, a lot of people make different partitions for to collect different files together. You know that kind of makes sense until you realise that if you fill one partition up you are screwed, as you have to put the files somewhere else which destroys the usefullness of your partion setup. Or you could just do the sensible thing and put them in folders which are dynamic in size. Just have a "Random" folder for random unorganised files, it's much easier and flexable than setting aside a particulr space.

[tocsin]

Right. It's just a fragmentation thing really. Even if it's been ages since you last defragmented your drive, check out how fragmented it's actually gotten. Windows XP seems to do an ok job of keeping that in check. Unless your drive is heavilly fragmented with files you are working with, it's doubtful you'd notice any difference in speed. So, you probably wouldn't need to worry about setting up a partition. It definitely won't hurt your CPU. If you're concerned about speed on your harddrive, I recomend going with an SATA RAID set up. PRices will still be going down but I just upgraded my machine to use one for video capture purposes. Even if your HD were to get fragmented, the odds of feeling it through a disk read or write at that point is pretty unlikely.

[FILTERZ]

and this one is also kinda in the wrong forum

[xfive]

and this one is also kinda in the wrong forum

It is? :doh: :eh:



To answer your question - no you get absolutely zero penalty for using partitions... it's all handled transparently to the system.
Infact partitioning speeds things up. :)

[The Divide]

Sweet, I will upartition it for the sake of the fragmentation using partition magic (amazing program)

Thanks for your help

[TechMouse]

and this one is also kinda in the wrong forum
I'd say it's a relevant issue here... no?

[FILTERZ]

well sort of relevant i suppose, but whatever , not that i care, just being pedantic but there is a forum for compurter related questions and such and its not really anything to do with actually producing music

[TechMouse]

well sort of relevant i suppose, but whatever , not that i care, just being pedantic but there is a forum for compurter related questions and such and its not really anything to do with actually producing music
Well, if you're just doing straight up IT / general computing, then there's no real benefit to partitioning past a straight OS / data seperation.

If you're dealing with large, ordered media (sound, video) then there is, as it stops over-fragmentation (or even Defrag istelf) from placing related data at opposite ends of the drive.

[FILTERZ]

Well yes i agree, sort of related but we all use pc `s or macs to make music , wouldn`t like to see it turn into a pc or mac workshop in here though, personally talking about hard drive partitions aint gonna improve my tunes .