Reasons for partitioning -
Defrag, backup restore of a quarter of the space are easier to manage -
Space management
Allowing for corruption of the allocation tables etc. - and you only have to
restore a portion of the drive if you are lucky,
Usage - perhaps 1 partition for all the office stuff - I.E. wot you type in
so it can be backed up frequently
and others for big files such as CD/DVD images, that you can re-create from
source if needed, so they don't need to be backed-up, or at least not more
than once, or twice, and that's as distinct file sets, never as an image
A single partition will fragment files at least as swiftly as partitions, as
file space is allocated to files by starting at the beginning of the drive,
and looking up it for available space.
So if all the files that change frequently are on 1 partition, then the
other partitions may not get fragmented files on them
Defragging 1 partition will probably be faster than 4 partitions, if the
partitions are all equally fragmented, but with appropriate usage, that is
unlikely as only 1 partition will be assigned for use for the files that get
frequently updated, replaced, or just deleted in the short term.
But remember access time to each portion of a file is:
time to locate the directory entry
+ time to locate each of the allocation blocks
+ time to move the heads to each of those blocks
+ time for the disk to rotate those blocks under the heads
and a fragmented file will take lots more of the head movement and block
location actions than one that is in a single block.#
Also defrag of a partition will involve lots of head movements to move files
from their current position to a temporary location to make space for
another file, then the original file needs moving from the temporary
location to it's appropriate location
(delete a file from the beginning of the partition, and a poor defrag
process may move almost all the other files on that partition to close up
the space that the deleted file originally occupied.)
So - I defrag the OS drive occasionally - usually after mass software
updates, or application installations
(I have a permanent pagefile that rarely needs expansion, and create a large
temporary file before the defrag,
That temporary file can be deleted before I do system updates, or installs
of stuff that will be used very frequently by the system so there is a gap
left near the start of the drive for updated files, and then create a
similar file to re-reserve that space)
I defrag my data ( wot I typed in) fairly frequently - it is only about 10GB
I rarely defrag the partitions with applications software installed, or
those with MP3's or video
So -
Yes, you can structure the use by directory tree on a single partition if
you don't want the advantages, and extra bother of having multiple
partitions
It's entirely up to you how you want to manage the system, and data on it!
JimB
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