On 24 Aug 2004 at 1:16, Owain Sutton wrote: >[quoting me, unattributed:] > > A small toll, one that is worth defragmenting every month or so or > > after any major churning of your drive (such as an OS upgrade). > > Also, one thing that makes a huge difference is how you partition > > your drives. If you have a single drive partition for OS and for > > programs and for data, then you're going to have more problems with > > fragmentation than if you have a partition for your OS, a separate > > partition for your programs and a third for data. > > > My experience with various installs of XP suggests that unless the > installer is savey enough to match the partitions to the physical > structure of the drive, . . .
Eh? What are you talking about here? If you've set the default program location to a different partition in the system registry, the installer will put the program files on the program partition, and perhaps a minimal number of files on the system partition. > . . . separate partitions ensures that performance > can never get above mediocre. . . . That's not an XP issue. It's an installer issue. Installers shouldn't be writing any files to the Windows system folder -- it's just a wrong practice that no installer ever should have used. > . . . There's little performance difference > between a drive hunting all over the drive for one file, and shuttling > between two disparate partitions to access two contigous files > simultaneously. What in the *world* are you talking about? No file is ever stored part on one partition and part on another, so fragmentation can never cross partitions. > A separate *physical drive*, however, works wonders. Particularly when > the swapfile is put onto it. I think you are very confused about the subject of the conversation. Separate partitions really *does* cut down on the amount of defragmentation, and as I described, is manageable at 3 different levels, system partition (OS), programs partition and data partition. If you put your temp folder, your IE temporary files (assuming you're dumb enough to be using IE) and your documents and settings folder on your data partition, the system partition will be written to very seldom, and only a small portion of it will be defragmented (unless, of course, you patch or upgrade the OS). The programs partition will fragment more than the system partition, because quite a few programs still store settings in their own folders (instead of in the correct location under the user's documents and settings folder). But the amount of defragmentation is slight. For both the system and programs partitions, the defragmentation will be in very small files, files that don't really matter. Once the drives are defragged, the big files will stay defragged, and that's going to be much more than 95% of the data on those drives (and it's going to be the big files that are the ones that drag down performance most when they are fragmented). Thus, the only partition that should need regular defragging is your data partition, which is constantly being churned by use (and because all the dynamic data for programs and the OS is also stored on it). Having multiple physical drives also improves performance, especially when you put all or part of the swap file on a different physical drive (as you suggest). But that issue is wholly orthogonal to the present topic of discussion. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
