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Create your own scheme within the rules...Jul 04 '00 Write an essay on this topic.“What's the best way to partition your hard drive?” This is a question that has haunted hardware buffs and do-it-yourselfer's since we put together our first systems. The answer lies somewhere between doing what feels good to you and dealing with the constraints imposed by your Operating System (OS) of choice. First a few words about the later then we’ll delve into the former. In the IBM clone and compatibles world we have to deal with what is know as File Allocation Tables or FAT. As the name suggest the FAT determines where files and folder (directories) are allocated (stored an or saved) on the hard drive. There are currently two versions of FAT. Which one you use depends on your OS of choice. Here is quick break down of OS’s and what FAT they use: MS-DOS 2.0 6.22: FAT16 Windows 95A: FAT16 Windows 95B: FAT16 or FAT32 Windows 98/98SE: FAT16 or FAT32 Windows NT Workstation 4.0: FAT16 Windows 2000 Professional: FAT32 If your OS of choice is Windows 95B, Windows 98 (either edition), and you use FAT16, you should convert your drive(s) to FAT32 if possible; there is a utility that will allow you to do so, included in OS. If you install Windows 98/98SE on a fresh hard drive it will choose FAT32 by default, while Windows 2000 Professional will give you a choice. As a matter of fact Windows 2000 Professional will only run under FAT32 or the successor to NTFS. To maximize hard drive space, make sure that none of your partitions are larger than 8GB. This will help the OS optimize cluster size. What are clusters and what do they have to do with hard drive space you ask? When a hard drive is partitioned and formatted, it is broken down in to sections called clusters. A cluster is the smallest amount of space FAT allocates to a file or folder for storage. For example, if a hard drive partition is less than 8GB and uses FAT32, the partition has cluster sizes of 4,192 bytes (4K). This is the minimum space in which a file can be stored. So, for instance even if a file is only 1K in size, it still takes up 4K of space. The other 3K are now wasted space! Here is a little trick you can use if your OS of choice is Windows 98 to see how much space your files are taking up: In Windows Explorer right clicking on a folder or file and select Properties. There are two different sizes listed, one in parentheses and one without. The size in parentheses (to the left) is the actual size of all the files, or file and the number not in parentheses (to the right) is the actual amount of space being take up on your hard drive. With FAT16 the partition sizes must be smaller in order to realize the benefits of small cluster sizes. Here are the cluster sizes per megabyte of space under FAT16: 16MB-128MB = 2K clusters 128MB-256MB = 4K clusters 256MB-512MB = 8K clusters 512MB-1GB = 8K 1GB-2GB = 32K Please note that 2BG is the largest partition size FAT16 can address. With FAT32, hard drive partitions less than 8GB use cluster sizes of 4K. Partitions 8GB to 32GB have cluster sizes of 8K, and partitions larger than 32GB have cluster sizes of 16K. As you can see, the smaller the cluster sizes, the less wasted hard drive space. So if you want to maximize your disk space, it is best to partition the hard drive into 8GB or less drives. I have always like to partition my hard drives according to what data and or applications I will store on them, and I use FAT32 whenever possible. For instance, say I have a number of .DOC (Word document files), and or .XLS (Excel), .JPG (JPEG graphics files), .MPG (MPEG Movie files), and .WAV (sound files), I want to store. I might section an 8 gig hard drive into two 1 gig partitions to hold the Operating System and Applications, and four 500MB logical drives as follows: Drive C: (2 Gig) - Operating System and utility files; i.e. Antivirus software. Drive D: (2 Gig) - Applications; i.e. Lotus Smart Suite, AOL, MS Word, etc. Drive E: (1 Gig) – Word processing, spreadsheet, and other data files. Drive F: (1 Gig) – Graphics files; i.e. .JPG, .PIX, .GIF, .BMP, etc. Drive G: (1 Gig) – Video files; i.e. .AVI, .MPG, .MOV, etc. Drive H: (1 Gig) – Sound files; i.e. .WAV This scheme keeps all of my partitions under 2GB and allows me to create logical drives of that make sense to me from a file storage perspective. Of course your needs will be different, but what is import to remember is this: keep the partition size under 8GB whenever possible (2GB is ideal for me). Hope this helped!  |
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