[OT-ish] HDD formatting "good practice"

[Vortex]

Well the time has come.....as it does every few years.

My HDD is virtually full. I have insufficient memory. My PC is too noisy. My son tells me my graphics card is inadequate. No more room for enhancements and upgrades. It's time for a new one.

I've just ordered one of these

with (amongst other things) a 500G HDD which I envisage assembling this weekend.

The most important decision I have to make in the coming days is whether to format the 500G as one huge partition or to have multiple partitions eg:

100G for OS and applications and 400G for My Documents/Pictures/Videos etc.

What would you do?

David

[Andrew Gabriel]

Ask the question in a computing/PC newsgroup.

[john2]

Well if its a Samsung HDD I wouldn't bother partitioning it at all. Formatting with Fdisk will destroy their weird low level format and only Samsung can recover it, as many users have found.

john2

[Guy King]

The message from john2 contains these words:

Never had that trouble with my Samsung drive.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Put Linux on it, and shoot my son.

[john2]

It applies to the 160 GB one that Aldi were flogging off cheapish last year, maybe not other Samsungs. Perhaps that's why it was cheap.

john2

[Christopher Tidy]

I doubt it matters much which you choose. In the event of a corrupted file system or failing hard drive partitioning should make data recovery easier, but whether it improves system performance is a matter of some debate. On the one hand having two file systems creates extra work for your CPU and disk, but it should reduce fragmentation of your operating system files. I'm under the impression, however, that on a PC running Windows it's pretty hard to move your user profiles (stuff like your Internet Explorer cache files and favourites, which are modified very frequently) onto a separate partition. Fragmentation should only become a problem when you're running out of space on the hard drive, and with a

500 GB disk that should take a while. I'm also under the impression that newer versions of Windows, using NTFS as opposed to FAT, are less susceptible to fragmentation, but it's been some time since I used Windows seriously myself. If you do decide to partition, put some serious thought into the size of the partitions - it's easy to get it wrong!

Best wishes,

Chris

[Tim S]

Any disk that does that is broken and needs returning...

Cheers

Tim

[Rob Convery]

Personally always put docs etc onto a second partition..why... so that if my OS screws up I can reinstall the OS without having to worry about loosing any docs. IMO thats the only thing partitioning a disk really gives of much benefit

[Guy King]

The message from john2 contains these words:

I had one of the Aldi WD 250GB drives. Marked on the box as "Internal Hard Disc Drive" on all faces except one - where it's maked "Infernal...."

[Tim S]

Hi

As odd as it may seem, there is a "right" answer for this. There are many variations of "right", but basically:

a) OS onto one partition (eg windows C:\ , Linux / /var /usr etc)

b) User data onto a different partition

a may be further subdivided (OS/applications/swap) and b may be subdivided (personal user data aka home directory versus "shared" data like films, mp3s, photos which the whole family access).

Do not ever install the OS onto a whole-disk-sized partition and then lose your data in amongst the crap. If you do and have to re-install the OS, you will weep.

Due to the fairly sucky way that DOS partitioning works, I would also make all partitions "primary partitions" upto the limit of 4, unless you know that the installer is using the newer MS partitioning scheme.

Something else to consider - leave a second partition spare so you can install a second OS. It won;t amount to much out of 1/2 TB.

Cheers

Tim

[Adrian C]

References?

[john2]

I put the drive number into Google and found a lot of people globally who had exactly the same problem. Samsung don't publish any data on heads, cylinders sectors etc for this model so it may be a much bigger drive, or one of several bigger drives, which had a lot of duff sectors that they've low level programmed within the controller to avoid.

I worked fine until I tried to reformat it....

john2

[john2]

I can't find the HDD at the moment to check its type No., but here's a couple of folk with what look similar problems trying to partition a different Samsung drive:

"vnunet.com forums - Unable to partition new samsung HDD I recently bought a brand new 8oGb Samsung HDD. I formatted it and installed XP ok. When i tried to partition it using Partition Magic 8 i was directed to ... forums.whatpc.co.uk/thread.jsp?forum=7&thread=47435&message=282559 - Similar pages"

Samsung have a downloadable HDD formatting utility at

I was messing about with at one stage but it didn't seem to solve my problems then I forgot about it (and finally lost the HDD somewhere).

john2

[Mike Barnes]

I second all of that.

On this PC, group (a) is subdivided into three partitions: Windows/apps (C: 17Gb), paging (P: 2Gb), and temp (T: 4Gb). Group (b) is divided into two partitions: documents and other files that need to be backed up frequently (D: 5Gb), and files that rarely or never need to be backed up (copy of the old PC's hard disk, copy of Windows CD, copies of audio CDs, etc) (N: 230Gb).

Partition Magic is good for settings things up and adjusting afterwards.

Agreed. I like to segregate my data principally according to the backup requirements. That way, I can put the backup strategy to the back of my mind, and never be in any doubt about what's being backed up when.

Good backup solutions can be quite cheap. I back up C: and D: to a 40Gb DAT tape. Drives and controllers are plentiful on eBay (I paid about £25). Software (NTBACKUP) is free with Windows.

[meow2222]

I would say about the oposite to that. I dont split discs and dont lose document files when installing or reinstalling an OS. Using a sensible backup routine gives backui[p protection. So far I've lost a total of one object as a result of storing it in an odd place and forgetting to include it in any backup, then a hdd failed. But partitioning wouldnt have helped that in any way.

Remeber the days of 500M and 1G drives? Remeber why partitioning was such abad idea then? 500G seems like a vast amount of storage now, but it will ni time become a 'small disc', and however you partition it now its guaranteed to be split alll wrong.once space starts getting low.

I remember when a 70M hdd was gargantuan, and none of us could figure out how we could ever fill it.

The one remaining question: how the heck do you backup a half terabyte disc? Only 100 dvds I spose, or less after compression.

NT

[vortex2]

FYI I have an elephants graveyard of old PC's and he HAS put Linux on them, as well as on his IPOD (for what purpose I do not know).

There's a version called Kubuntu which I reckon is pretty cool.

Problem is that I do not have a beard and my son is too young to grow one.

Sticking with Bill Gates for now. Actively considering purging Rupert Murdoch from my life though.

D

[vortex2]

I've been investigating backups and I reckon that Network Attached Storage is the solution. Something like this:

I am thinking that if "My Pictures" and "My Music" were on a disk like this then they could be viewed/listened to from another PC easily

david

[PeTe33]

Definitely partition.

even multiple partitions.

One for Windows (don't underestimate the amount of space this may require. One for Music/Photos and other "valuable" data One for something else.

Having had to re-install Windows on my single partition PC supplied with no WinXP disk but the installation S/Ware on a partion, the only way I could resolve it was with a format which being one partition screwed the whole lot.

Now I have to copy the whole lot back again (including GB's of pictures and backup data.

Seperate partitions would have saved all this (Win XP MCE Home edition)

HTH

[vortex2]

That's curious, it works for me......

I formed the reverse impression trying to get my son's Linux PC to see my Windows shared printer.

David