Optimizing your hard drive
Aug 06 '00 (Updated Dec 06 '05)
The Bottom Line This Article is Old Now and the Native Windows XP NTFS will Typically do a great Job at keeping things Clean for you.
This appears to be a highly debated area on this site. I feel that vemartin gave all the details needed about cluster sizes and the difference between Fat and Fat32. What I believe I can add to that is the compromise between saving space and gaining speed. I hope that anyone reading this gains from my advice and experience in these areas.
Ambiguity
Many of you are asking how many partitions should I have? Well, if you have a Windows 9x machine one is really all you need ideally. However, life is hardly ever ideal. Therefore, consider you may want to save data on a separate partition then your system partition (the one with windows on it). If you’re like me you have three different Operating Systems on the machine and use four primary partitions (one is for the Linux Swap file). Like I said there are many reasons why you would want more then one partition and there really is no right answer to this question except what’s right for you.
The Tools
About the only tool that I need for Windows 98 or 98SE is partition magic. However, on a Windows 95 machine you may want to consider getting Norton Utilities for it’s defragging software. I personally favor PowerQuest tools over Norton’s tools, but this is just my preference. For dealing with a corrupted swap file a 98 startup disk is ideal.
Decisions
The first thing you have to ask yourself is, “Does speed matter more to me then space?”. If you decide that space is the most important thing in your decision then the information provided by vemartin in his review was enough for you. If you said, “I have 35 Gigs I can stand to have some space taken away to gain some speed!” then you’ve come to the right place and by all means continue reading!
Dealing with swap file corruption
Ideally this is a simple matter that many don’t realize is very easy to get around. This hasn’t changed much at all since Windows has been using swap files (and that is probably since it’s beginning) and getting rid of a fragmented swap file is as easy in 98 as it was in 3.0. All you have to do is boot up from a Windows 98 startup disk and delete the file Win386.swp in the C:\windows directory. Windows will recreate this file for you as a fresh new file totally free from fragmentation. Now that wasn’t so hard was it? If you fear doing it this way then go in to the virtual memory settings and disable virtual memory and reboot the PC. If you get errors on startup go in to safe mode delete the swap file and re-enable virtual memory and reboot the PC again.
*Note – The rest of this review assumes that your largest partition is 8 Gigs.
Optimizing Partitions
The first thing to do here is to install Partition Magic and restart your PC. After the PC restarts you want to start partition magic and highlight any 8 Gig partition that you want to speed up and increase the sector size to either 8k or 16k clusters. I use 16k as I would rather have speed then save space and you can go as high as 32k but that’s overkill. After making this decision hit apply and Partition Magic will warn you that it has to restart to make these changes, just hit ok. At this point the program will realign your data and change the sector size. This will be noticeable as soon as you start using the system. You’ll see a drastic speed improvement however, make note of what vemartin said in his article earlier about wasted space. Ideally this technique can be used on any system even those name brand systems previously warned about.
As for those of you using NT 4.0, the biggest boost you can get is going from FAT to NTFS. If you’re using NT 4.0 and your drive is already NTFS then you should consider getting Diskeeper 5.0 to keep your partition and page file defragged. For those of you worried about not being able to get at the data on an NTFS partition should NT fail, take a look at ERD Commander from wininterals.com.
Conclusion
Overall I don’t think this is that big of a deal and can be taken care of quite easily. Of course everyone has to decide which approach they want to take to optimizing their hard drive and choose between speed and space. I only hope that my advice here helps someone make their PC perform the way they want it to. In the future look for an article about optimizing Windows 98 to gain even more speed.
*****The Following portions of this article were written by vemartin with his permission of course. This is his entire unedited article concerning hard drive partitioning. If you highly rate my review I ask that you also do the same for his as his article is a lead in to my article.*****
Create your own scheme within the rules...
“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 2 gig partitions to hold the Operating System and Applications, and four 1 Gig 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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