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How to slice a 2TB drive?
I am reading this:
http://partition.radified.com/ Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off on this. All I want to do is break the disk into 6 or so equal parts. The main reason is to give each part its own drive letter and disk label. This makes the FAT 6 times smaller so it only has to read 1/6 of the info during access times. I also think this makes defragging easier, but since XP doesn't always let me defrag without booting, I don't defrag much.....well never. XP allows 3 primary partitions and one extended (that can be sliced many times) The only reason for a primary partition is to boot from. I am not booting from this drive at all, but I don't see any reason not to have 3 primary partitions, so my plain is...2,000G/6 is about 350. I am going to have 3-350 primary and whatever is left will be the extended partition. Because I have never dealt with logical drives, I assume after I split the disk into 4 parts, I will have the option of splitting the extended partition again into 3-300G parts. Does this sound like it will fly? |
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#2
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
Metspitzer wrote:
I am reading this: http://partition.radified.com/ Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off on this. All I want to do is break the disk into 6 or so equal parts. The main reason is to give each part its own drive letter and disk label. This makes the FAT 6 times smaller so it only has to read 1/6 of the info during access times. I also think this makes defragging easier, but since XP doesn't always let me defrag without booting, I don't defrag much.....well never. XP allows 3 primary partitions and one extended (that can be sliced many times) The only reason for a primary partition is to boot from. I am not booting from this drive at all, but I don't see any reason not to have 3 primary partitions, so my plain is...2,000G/6 is about 350. I am going to have 3-350 primary and whatever is left will be the extended partition. Because I have never dealt with logical drives, I assume after I split the disk into 4 parts, I will have the option of splitting the extended partition again into 3-300G parts. Does this sound like it will fly? I have another suggestion. Ad-hoc partitioning. Start with a primary partition. Make it big enough for a reasonable time span of usage. Leave the rest of the space unpartitioned and unused. Now, when you do backups, defragging or other forms of maintenance, you won't be waiting hours for 2TB of empty sectors to be processed, examined or copied. If you actually had 2TB of data available from other sources, then you would be able to prepare a plan based on some sort of filing system. (X space for photos, Y space for movies, Z space for documents, and so on.) For example, say I had 1TB of movies stored on a ton of small drives. I'd set up a 1TB NTFS partition, then copy over the movies. That partition will never need to be defragmented, as all the files are big ones. You'll want to run chkdsk on it occasionally, to remove dormant faults before they become an issue. But otherwise, there might not be much to do there, except to make the occasional backup. Keep your C: partition relatively small. If you make it a big partition (such as your 350GB plan), then before you know it, it'll be filled with 500000 small "cruft" files, and be painful and slow to maintain or to search (if you're not using a good third party search tool). So rather than being fixated on "slicing up an apple pie", put some thought into the real usage. And if no plan comes to mind, leave the unused parts blank. A plan will come together, sooner than you think. You can use primaries for the first three, because premature usage of an extended, will only mean backing up and laying it out again later. You can never get the split between an extended, and the rest of the partitions, right. As an example of this, I have somewhere around a 320GB disk in my new laptop. I shrank the C: partition on it, down to 30GB (with a plan perhaps, in the near future, to move up to 40GB, so I can safely install SP1). The rest of the disk is currently empty, and there are no other partitions than the wasteful partition scheme the manufacturer of the laptop put there. HTH, Paul |
#3
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
On 11-03-11 07:46 PM, Metspitzer wrote:
I am reading this: http://partition.radified.com/ Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off on this. All I want to do is break the disk into 6 or so equal parts. The main reason is to give each part its own drive letter and disk label. This makes the FAT 6 times smaller so it only has to read 1/6 of the info during access times. I also think this makes defragging easier, but since XP doesn't always let me defrag without booting, I don't defrag much.....well never. XP allows 3 primary partitions and one extended (that can be sliced many times) The only reason for a primary partition is to boot from. I am not booting from this drive at all, but I don't see any reason not to have 3 primary partitions, so my plain is...2,000G/6 is about 350. I am going to have 3-350 primary and whatever is left will be the extended partition. Because I have never dealt with logical drives, I assume after I split the disk into 4 parts, I will have the option of splitting the extended partition again into 3-300G parts. Does this sound like it will fly? If you're not going to be booting from this disk, then why bother with primary partitions at all? Just make them all part of a single extended partition. Yousuf Khan |
#4
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
I am going to have 3-350 primary and whatever is left will be the
extended partition. Because I have never dealt with logical drives, I assume after I split the disk into 4 parts, I will have the option of splitting the extended partition again into 3-300G parts. I would create 3 primary & 1 extended. The extended partition can be further sliced into more than 4 volumes. -- @~@ Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY. / v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you! /( _ )\ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.37.3 ^ ^ 12:34:01 up 22:55 0 users load average: 1.13 1.12 1.13 不借貸! 不詐騙! 不援交! 不打交! 不打劫! 不自殺! 請考慮綜援 (CSSA): http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_...sub_addressesa |
#5
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
On Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:46:11 -0500, Metspitzer
wrote: I am reading this: http://partition.radified.com/ Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off on this. After listening to the suggestions, can you do this with XP? Say I create an extended partition (no primary) that is 1/4 space on the drive and leave 3/4 unformatted (unallocated?), and make that 4 logical drives. Say I have a very good reason for having 4 different type files. All I expect to happen is that when I run out of space is that I just want all 4 drives to double in space. What happens when I want to use another 1/4 of the space and I don't really want 8 logical drives? I want 4 drives twice as large. This make sense to anyone? |
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
On Sat, 12 Mar 2011 12:37:16 +0800, Man-wai Chang
wrote: I am going to have 3-350 primary and whatever is left will be the extended partition. Because I have never dealt with logical drives, I assume after I split the disk into 4 parts, I will have the option of splitting the extended partition again into 3-300G parts. I would create 3 primary & 1 extended. The extended partition can be further sliced into more than 4 volumes. That was my original plan. I am now considering only using part of the drive. Thanks |
#7
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
In message someone claiming
to be Metspitzer typed: I am reading this: http://partition.radified.com/ Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off on this. All I want to do is break the disk into 6 or so equal parts. The main reason is to give each part its own drive letter and disk label. This makes the FAT 6 times smaller so it only has to read 1/6 of the info during access times. This isn't a factor for NTFS, NTFS' directory structures are distributed around the disk and do not require a full scan. I also think this makes defragging easier, but since XP doesn't always let me defrag without booting, I don't defrag much.....well never. Defragmenting tends to be more efficient on partitions with higher percentages of free space (or at least it gets extremely inefficient with reduces amount of space), so if you end up with three partitions that are 90% full followed by one that is empty, you'll take significantly longer to defragment than a single partition. Moreover, fragmentation gets worse faster when the drive is full, so you'll potentially hurt performance before you even count defragmenting time. (Personally I don't care how long a defragmentation takes, within reason, it's the sort of thing the computer does when I'm not around and therefore don't care) XP allows 3 primary partitions and one extended (that can be sliced many times) That's a BIOS limit going way back to the 80s. The only reason for a primary partition is to boot from. I am not booting from this drive at all, but I don't see any reason not to have 3 primary partitions, so my plain is...2,000G/6 is about 350. A better question is why? I am going to have 3-350 primary and whatever is left will be the extended partition. Because I have never dealt with logical drives, I assume after I split the disk into 4 parts, I will have the option of splitting the extended partition again into 3-300G parts. Does this sound like it will fly? You can have as many logical partitions within the one extended partition as you want, so the total number is moot. Strictly speaking you can only boot from a primary partition, but beyond that, there's little need to care about the difference between primary and logical partitions these days. There's really very little need to worry about partitioning at all in most cases, even with 2TB volume sizes, unless you have multiple operating systems, have a need for different types of filesystems, or have organizational reasons that might cause you to want to wipe one partition entirely. The days of having to partition as a matter of course are basically an element of the past, at least in the Windows world. |
#8
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
I would create 3 primary& 1 extended. The extended partition can be
further sliced into more than 4 volumes. That was my original plan. I am now considering only using part of the drive. You are the boss. Do it your way! -- @~@ Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY. / v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you! /( _ )\ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.37.3 ^ ^ 16:49:01 up 1 day 3:10 0 users load average: 1.09 1.09 1.09 不借貸! 不詐騙! 不援交! 不打交! 不打劫! 不自殺! 請考慮綜援 (CSSA): http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_...sub_addressesa |
#9
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
Per Paul:
As an example of this, I have somewhere around a 320GB disk in my new laptop. I shrank the C: partition on it, down to 30GB (with a plan perhaps, in the near future, Assuming that you did that without having to re-install the OS, what utility did you use? -- PeteCresswell |
#10
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
(PeteCresswell) wrote: Assuming that you did that without having to re-install the OS, what utility did you use? I suggest have a look at Acronis disk Director http://tinyurl.com/5u8b6oo Or try this preview link for your confidence of the very long link: http://preview.tinyurl.com/5u8b6oo hth |
#11
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
(PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per Paul: As an example of this, I have somewhere around a 320GB disk in my new laptop. I shrank the C: partition on it, down to 30GB (with a plan perhaps, in the near future, Assuming that you did that without having to re-install the OS, what utility did you use? I used the "shrink" option in Windows 7 Disk Management, which on its own has the ability to shrink a partition by 50%. To get a partition smaller than that, I used an evaluation copy of Raxco PerfectDisk, for its ability to move metadata files in the NTFS partition, "to the left". By combining the two tools, I was able to shrink the C: partition to the desired size. Since the operation was a one time thing, I threw away the eval when I was finished. On my WinXP machine, when I was doing stuff like this, I defragmented the target partitions first, so as much of the data was "to the left" as was possible. Then, I used Partition Magic for the changes. I have some things installed, which are just too complicated to meddle with. For example, I have nothing here I can rely on, for dealing with UFS file systems. I prefer situations, where I have more than one OS, that can work on a file system, so if there is an issue with the file system being "busy", I can come up with a way of working around it. I was surprised, when the "all purpose toolbox" Linux, wouldn't go near a UFS, leaving me high and dry. (I think Solaris and FreeBSD can use UFS. They generally end up living on their own disks.) Paul |
#12
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
On Mar 12, 3:28 am, Metspitzer wrote:
On Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:46:11 -0500, Metspitzer wrote: I am reading this: http://partition.radified.com/ Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off on this. After listening to the suggestions, can you do this with XP? Say I create an extended partition (no primary) that is 1/4 space on the drive and leave 3/4 unformatted (unallocated?), and make that 4 logical drives. Say I have a very good reason for having 4 different type files. All I expect to happen is that when I run out of space is that I just want all 4 drives to double in space. What happens when I want to use another 1/4 of the space and I don't really want 8 logical drives? I want 4 drives twice as large. This make sense to anyone? Yes. In fat32 it means you'll be up all night. In the morning you have a 1.5T drive for 375Meg you allocated for 4 drive letters in an extended partition. All day you copy data to them. But, it's getting late and entropy and endless data happens, keeps on streaming, you change your mind and now want to allocate another 375M equally for each 94Meg drive letter, which effectively will yield four each at 188Meg drives. Starting with the last physically placed drive (remember, lettering is arbitrary in XP), that last drive is to be enlarged and moved farthest away from the next-to-last 94Meg drive. Upon completion and becoming a 188Meg drive, the next-to-last 94meg becomes the last drive, and the procedure is repeated until all four drives are enlarged. It can be a cumbersome process according to the software, (sizes, data type, and file systems), as well, during the "enlargement" -- the data formerly occupying less space is dispersed over a greater space in "wider" distances between the drive sector and cluster assignments. This requires disk fragment consolidation, where that same data is "squeezed" back into a contingent whole. All of which, we now have established to know, the moving and expanding of drive, as well subsequently consolidating data, is time consuming. Therefore, you're going to be up all night, no longer a simple computer operator, but squeezing boxes like an accordion player. |
#13
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
On Sun, 13 Mar 2011 14:13:49 -0700 (PDT), Flasherly
wrote: On Mar 12, 3:28 am, Metspitzer wrote: On Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:46:11 -0500, Metspitzer wrote: I am reading this: http://partition.radified.com/ Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off on this. After listening to the suggestions, can you do this with XP? Say I create an extended partition (no primary) that is 1/4 space on the drive and leave 3/4 unformatted (unallocated?), and make that 4 logical drives. Say I have a very good reason for having 4 different type files. All I expect to happen is that when I run out of space is that I just want all 4 drives to double in space. What happens when I want to use another 1/4 of the space and I don't really want 8 logical drives? I want 4 drives twice as large. This make sense to anyone? Yes. In fat32 it means you'll be up all night. In the morning you have a 1.5T drive for 375Meg you allocated for 4 drive letters in an extended partition. All day you copy data to them. But, it's getting late and entropy and endless data happens, keeps on streaming, you change your mind and now want to allocate another 375M equally for each 94Meg drive letter, which effectively will yield four each at 188Meg drives. Starting with the last physically placed drive (remember, lettering is arbitrary in XP), that last drive is to be enlarged and moved farthest away from the next-to-last 94Meg drive. Upon completion and becoming a 188Meg drive, the next-to-last 94meg becomes the last drive, and the procedure is repeated until all four drives are enlarged. It can be a cumbersome process according to the software, (sizes, data type, and file systems), as well, during the "enlargement" -- the data formerly occupying less space is dispersed over a greater space in "wider" distances between the drive sector and cluster assignments. This requires disk fragment consolidation, where that same data is "squeezed" back into a contingent whole. All of which, we now have established to know, the moving and expanding of drive, as well subsequently consolidating data, is time consuming. Therefore, you're going to be up all night, no longer a simple computer operator, but squeezing boxes like an accordion player. No one said FAT32. I have files that are larger then 4G. I was talking about the File Allocation Table. I plan to use NTFS. Among the many things I don't know about disk drives, my main question I have now is....how do drive letters work if you only allocate a 1/4 of the drive at a time? If I make 4 drive letters now and then allocate another 1/4 of the drive, can I make the current 4 drives twice as large or do I just add another drive letter? |
#14
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
You'll get more authoritative and experienced replies in
comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage . That's the hard drive newsgroup. As I understand it, your questions is basically whether you can put just an Extended partition on an external USB hard drive and use unallocated space in the future to expand the logical drives within that Extended partition. Keep your questions precise, and include the name of the operating system and its edition level. *TimDaniels* |
#15
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How to slice a 2TB drive?
On Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:21:15 -0700, "Timothy Daniels"
wrote: You'll get more authoritative and experienced replies in comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage . That's the hard drive newsgroup. As I understand it, your questions is basically whether you can put just an Extended partition on an external USB hard drive and use unallocated space in the future to expand the logical drives within that Extended partition. Keep your questions precise, and include the name of the operating system and its edition level. *TimDaniels* Got it going. I made 3-320 primary partitions and one extended which I split into 3 more drives. Thanks everyone |
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