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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Bissett who wrote (1464)	6/21/1998 11:47:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

>> why is it valuable to have different partitions on your drive? << Beauty is in the eye of the beholder:) I have never been big on partitions. I have only used them out of necessity. They are generally used to organize a harddisc or to make it compatible with multiple operating systems or to assist in a backup strategy. For example I have a machine with a 9 GB drive which is setup for dual boot Win95/NT. The only file system that is common to Win95 and NT is FAT. FAT does not support drives larger than 2.1 GB. The drive is partitioned into four 2 GB partitions because of the FAT thing. Some backup utilities (Partition Magic ) will back up one drive to another drive. It will not copy a partition onto itself. If you have only one harddrive you can partition it and then backup from one partition to the other. In the FAT file system you get more efficient use of space with smaller drive sizes. There is another barrier at 8.x GB. One work around is to partition a large drive to 8 GB or less. Partitions can be hidden. One could install an Operating System on one partion and another OS on a second partition. Then hide the first and you will boot from the second. Zeuspaul

To: Dave Bissett who wrote (1464)	6/22/1998 2:40:00 AM
From: Howard R. Hansen	Respond to of 14778

>> why is it valuable to have different partitions on your drive? Thanks. << Another viewpoint on this question. The primary reason for having multiple partitions is to avoid wasting space on your hard disk. The operating system either DOS or Windows allocates space for files in clusters. Prior to Win 95 OSR2 and Win 98 the rules for a hard disk were a cluster size of either 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, or 32768 bytes and a maximum number of clusters per partition of 65,536. Using these rules gave partition sizes of: Cluster size = 2048 bytes, Maximum partition size = 134 megabytes Cluster size = 4096 bytes, Maximum partition size = 268 megabytes Cluster size = 8192 bytes, Maximum partition size = 537 megabytes Cluster size = 16384 bytes, Maximum partition size = 1074 megabytes Cluster size = 32768 bytes, Maximum partition size = 2147 megabytes Now if you have a lot of small files and you use a large cluster size you waste a lot of storage space. I once received a program that listed the hard disk requirements as: Cluster size = 4096 megabytes, Space required = 160 megabytes Cluster size = 32768 megabytes, Space required = 380 megabytes There is also a trade off between cluster size and speed. Your disk controller can read and write data faster with larger cluster sizes. A secondary reason to have multiple partitions is with large disks, over 2 gigabytes in size, and with a maximum partition size of 2 gigabytes you had to partition the disk to use all of the disk. A third reason to partition a hard disk is if you, Zeuspaul for example, like to use multiple operating systems on your computer. There are some exceptions to this rule but in general each operating system should be installed in a separate partition. Examples of operating systems others like to install in a separate partition are Windows NT and LINUX. However, with the release of Windows 95 OSR2 and Win 98 the rules have changed. Both of these operating system can use something called FAT32. The rules for FAT32 are: Drive size 0 to 260 megabytes, Cluster size = 512 bytes Drive size 260 megabytes to 8 gigabytes, Cluster size = 4096 bytes. Drive size 8 to 16 gigabytes, Cluster size = 8192 bytes Drive size 16 to 32 gigabytes, Cluster size = 16384 bytes Drive size 32 gigabytes to 2 terabytes, Cluster size = 32768 bytes. Notice for drives in the 260 to 8 gigabyte range, it eliminates the primary and secondary reasons given above for having multiple partitions.

To: Dave Bissett who wrote (1464)	6/22/1998 8:18:00 AM
From: Sean W. Smith	Respond to of 14778

Anyone...please answer a basic question so I can follow this discussion better....why is it valuable to have different partitions on your drive? Thanks. DB makes it easier for less experienced users to manage the programs and data separetely. generally I recommend most users do this but I avoid this practice personally because I deal with large amounts of data and want my free space all in one place. Prior to FAT32/NTFS/HPFS it was a good a idea to reducde cluster size and get improved space utilization from yuur hard drive as well. Of course, there are uses for multiboot machines which beyond the scope of a beginner question. Sean