People,

Just completed a complete reinstallation of XP (for some reason, "System Restore" was never functional.)  I'm at a point at which, if I intend to partition...(in order to benefit my PC's primary use, which is audio multitracking)...I should do so now. 

I have 2 drives, the secondary used for audio data; & the primary (right now) for everything else (OS, SONAR, WaveLab, other apps, graphics files, etc.)  XP permits me to partition the drives (& I am very hopefully assuming I can move files/folders afterward...i.e., use XP for this task, as opposed to a partitioning program.)

1) If I leave "everything else" on the primary drive, as one large partition, does XP arrange everything in an order conductive to optimum data retrieval (I keep thinking that, from an electro-mechanical aspect...the OS should be located on a separate platter from the applications, so that "different" tracking heads are working simultaneously?)

2) If I partition, what goes where; & why? (I am assuming one partition for OS, another for audio apps; & another for typical apps, would be acceptable?)

3) How are partitions related to drive platters; & is that relative to optimum data flow?

4) I was digging around in my XP bible ("XP Inside Out", by Bott & Siechert) for all this, but couldn't find anything of immediate use.  Can someone please point me toward some good links?

Thanks very much,

mark4man

Just completed a complete reinstallation of XP 

XP permits me to partition the drives (& I am very hopefully assuming I can move files/folders afterward...i.e., use XP for this task, as opposed to a partitioning program.)

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Hi mark4man,

I am not the most qualified to be answering this but I see a bit of an error here. I do not believe you can use XP to partition without doing it at the time of install. If you want to save all existing files on the drive you want to partition, you will need to use a third party app.

If you partition as part of the installation, you will loose everything on the drive.  The data on the second drive will be OK, but you will need to take ownership of the data to be able to access this.

1.  Data is not written by platter, but by sector.  Sectors span platters in a vertical aligned format.

2.  Partition plans are a personal choice.  At the very least, data should be on a seperate partition to facilitate backups.

3.  Partitions are just logical areas of the drive.

Yeechhh - you'd eat something out of that lake, Bulldog?

Get checked for 'heavy metals' & PCBs!

(Pardon the inadvertent hijack, mark4man!  - just having some fun!)

Discussions on partitioning and swapfiles are among the most common and useless on the boards. Yes, if you have two physical drives, than that's faster. No, if you have only one partitioning won't be faster but slower (because the heads have to travel more).

Still, I'm strongly in favour of partitioning, even with one disk. Simply because of the increased ability to backup data. Having two disks is obvious a big advantage and there is no strong need to partition any further.

EDIT: Could this link possibly be of any use?: http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/hist.html

Thanks all,

Think I'll just leave it alone for now; & keep an eye on performance.  I can always go back & partition later via a partitioning program (wouldn't partition for the sake of backup...usually split that up into logical CD-R size chunks, anyway.)

Thanks again; & also for the link, BA.

mark4man