Partitioning my laptop

I suggest deleting the one big partition and creating 3 fourty-gig partitions formatted with ntfs filesystem. Then do a clean install of the operating system.

At least I try to no create partitions greater than 50 Gig (only in special cases, like heavy video editing or mastering issues - DVD-audio and so on). Defragmenting is a not so big problem if you have smaller partitions, because you can store mostly static data on one partition, while storing dynamic data (files that are often modified, deleted, newly created) on the first partition together with the operating system. Third partition for ISO creation, DVD mastering, e.g. (huge files that are created and deleted the next instance - after burning to be precise).

This reduces the defrag process mostly to the first drive. And you also think a lot more about organizing your data (I know some people, owning a >250gig drive, only one partition - content is like absolute chaos, you find nothing, absolutely nothing...)

cya
liquid

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Rock

Defragmenting your HDD is overrated, anyway.

Well thats your opinion and I certainly don't share this one.

Originally Posted by Rock

At least with an NTFS file system and a fairly recent drive model, you won't experience any noticable slowdown due to a fragmented disk. Defragmenting once every three or four months is more than enough, even if you have a large > 250 GB partition/disk.

They even say this about reiserfs, reiser4 and some of the even more advanced file systems in the unix area. But the fact is that even these filesystem fragment and if you reach a fragmentation degree somewhere around 50% you will experience some performance loss (and I want to emphasize: ntfs isn't really advanced...).
I won't elaborate more on that, because everyone has to decide on his own if it's worth the time to defragment the filesystem. if you get you perf back by defragmentation then be happy, it not...search somewhere else for the bottleneck (at least I always get back my speed - often working with lots of tiny files)

Originally Posted by Rock

I also doubt the positive effect of small partitions. It's entirely subjective, but I like to have my data organized in one partition on a single drive (I'm even using a 320 GB one at the moment). Organization is a moot argument, because you can use folders to achieve the same effect while not having to worry about partition space.

To me its also a 'security reason'. I like my data being more 'physically' separated than only through a structure in the filesystem. Maybe it's also because I'm a linux guy - I unmount everything that is currently no in use, and you can do this best if you've separate partitions.

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