Am I unique to liking a small C partition?

J

jordan12

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I have always utilized a small main drive. So right now, I have a small older 80 gig Sata drive, and that is my C drive. I prefer nothing else on that drive.

So only the windows install, my apps, and a couple of games that I play. Not a big gamer.

But it makes my machine slower because it is a slower drive. I have never liked the idea of taking like a 640 gig Black drive,and partitioning it.

Do I have a flaw in my preference?
 
I got the OS, Programs and a download partition on an 80 GB HDD at the moment, so no, you're not alone :) 5 GB for XP, 20 GB for apps, and 35 GB for downloads. Works fine.

Having a faster OS drive does help, yes, but it really depends on what you do whether it makes any appreciable difference.
 
Not all all, this a common thing to do. However, the OS drive should be a FAST drive.
 
I agree that it should be a fast drive. But besides going SSD, I dont see many options for a small main OS drive. I just bought a used 74 gig raptor. I am thinking that will be faster than my current 80 gig WD 2 MG cache drive.

Or I hope anyway
 
I think it's kind of weird that you don't like the idea of partitioning a larger hard drive to use only with your OS but I don't think there's anything wrong with liking a small OS partition. I have 60GB allocated for Windows 7 and programs and would prefer to keep my data completely separate. It makes reformatting much easier and gives me some peace of mind.
 
Am I unique to liking a small C partition?

Not at all.
My Windows 7 64-bit partition is 30GB. It only has 9.5GB of used space on it.
The partition image is only 5GB and can be restored in less than 3 minutes.
All data and application settings remain intact when I do a fresh install, or restore a partition image.

A new utility comes along on the web I find interesting? I download and install and give it a try.
Don't like it? Restore my latest OS image. After 3 minutes, I am back to the clean untouched OS, with all my apps as they were, and there is no sign of the utility.
It's very convenient.
 
MrF said:
Am I unique to liking a small C partition?

Not at all.
My Windows 7 64-bit partition is 30GB. It only has 9.5GB of used space on it.
The partition image is only 5GB and can be restored in less than 3 minutes.
All data and application settings remain intact when I do a fresh install, or restore a partition image.

A new utility comes along on the web I find interesting? I download and install and give it a try.
Don't like it? Restore my latest OS image. After 3 minutes, I am back to the clean untouched OS, with all my apps as they were, and there is no sign of the utility.
It's very convenient.
Click to expand...

Is your applications installed on your C drive as well?
 
jordan12 said:
Is your applications installed on your C drive as well?
Click to expand...
No.
The only thing on C is the OS. C is the first partition on my fast drive.
I install all applications on D. D is the rest of my fast hard drive.
My documents, My Music, and all those personal folders are on D.
System restore is disabled (since I have an image of my OS).
Pagefile is on a secondary hard drive (except a small 16MB pagefile left on C in case of a core dump).
My email client places all emails on D.
 
I've done the same thing for years now. I mainly did it to separate the OS from things I needed to keep safe in the event I needed to format the OS drive and re-install. I currently have a 1GB drive, but I use a 50GB C: partition that XP and non-essential programs are installed to, everything else goes to D:.

It also comes in handy if I want to experiment with something that might break my OS. It's much faster to make a copy of a 50GB partition than if I just used the whole drive as C:
 
jordan12 said:
I have always utilized a small main drive. So right now, I have a small older 80 gig Sata drive, and that is my C drive. I prefer nothing else on that drive.

So only the windows install, my apps, and a couple of games that I play. Not a big gamer.

But it makes my machine slower because it is a slower drive. I have never liked the idea of taking like a 640 gig Black drive,and partitioning it.

Do I have a flaw in my preference?
Click to expand...
No I don't think you're weird, you just have an odd preference. One of those things that just doesn't 'seem' right to you. It's probably because you haven't come up with a better solution.

What I do with my WD 640 is have a smaller C: partition (around 200GB) and use the remaining (around 375) as a second partition D:. Then I point my user folder (music,documents,downloads, etc) to D: drive. It helps so when I format and reinstall Windows, I just blow away C: drive and reinstall and have all my data in one place. Point the folders back to those folders on D: and all your data is back like you never formatted.

What I'm eventually going to do is take my external drive (which is 375GB formatted) and set it up to sync with D:. That way I have a backup of everything I am saving in my user folder, and I know that once D: is low on space, so would my external drive be as well. Just delete old files and resync and I have a perfect backup to backup my user folder.
 
Did something different this round and have a 5 drive raid 5 running off a real intel raid card.

In the past I've done a small raid 1 for the os and apps(last one was with 2 200 gig drives) and moved all of my data to a second raid.

Important data went to an external usb drive for backup and sometimes to my test server.
 
C: 300GB Velociraptor - OS/Programs
D: 1.5 TB WD Green - Documents/Storage
 
MrF said:
No.
The only thing on C is the OS. C is the first partition on my fast drive.
I install all applications on D. D is the rest of my fast hard drive.
My documents, My Music, and all those personal folders are on D.
System restore is disabled (since I have an image of my OS).
Pagefile is on a secondary hard drive (except a small 16MB pagefile left on C in case of a core dump).
My email client places all emails on D.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but a lot (or is it some?) of programs now don't give you a choice of where to install them; it's C: or nothing. Also, some remnants of the program, even though you don't know it, are really on the C: drive (dll's, etc.) even though the program folder is, let's say, on the D: drive.

.
 
Last edited:
dekruyter said:
Yeah, but a lot (or is it some?) of programs now don't give you a choice of where to install them; it's C: or nothing. .
Click to expand...

Very few programs give you no option for install location. Those programs which do give you no option are poorly written ones which it would be best to replace with something better written.
 
I do not like using a single smaller drive for my OS due to the fact that unless it's a Raptor or SSD, it's likely going to be rather slow. I have three systems sitting here with similar specs but different hard drives with the OS installations. I can tell a night and day difference in regular OS operation between the systems due to the slower drives in the other two systems. However, daily use of physically sitting in front of those systems is limited and usually not disk intensive so it's not normally a problem.

In my main system, I have a 40 gig partition for Win7 on my WD640AAKS. At the current time, this partition is half used. Part of it is used by the OS installation of course and the other part is for installed programs which have to be reinstalled when the OS is reinstalled. From what I remember, I believe I only have one program that requires to be installed to the Program Files directory to work properly. This doesn't matter to me as it's a program which has to be reinstalled with the OS anyway. Otherwise, I install games and programs to different hard drives.

The remainder of the space on my main drive is for storage. On here I mostly have media files which don't require much in the way of disk access. I do this so there is little to get in the way of I/O for the OS.

Keep in mind I have three hard drives in my main system. The absolute minimum number of drives is two although I prefer three. I do this on purpose in order to spread out disk access. I'm not constantly doing heavy disk access but there are times I am doing that and it helps keep the system responsive and snappy. Other than the OS, I do not do anything disk intensive on the physical drive my OS is installed on.

I do not suggest running an older, smaller hard drive for the OS. These drives are usually a lot slower than newer drives and the performance difference can be night and day. Platter density makes a huge difference. I changed OS drives three times in about a six month period in my main machine and noticed a difference each time starting with a Seagate 320gig 7200.10, then moving to a Seagate 500gig 7200.11 and finally moving to a WD 640AAKS drive. There was a small difference between the Seagates but the WD was a huge difference. There is no way I could stand running an old 80gig drive as my main drive. I recently swapped out a similar drive in my third system and replaced it with a Seagate 250 gig drive and the difference is night and day on that system. The system is used a good bit by my 9 year old son and he noticed the difference after I changed it.

 
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