In your opinion, do you think its better to have multiple partitions on a large drive or is the performance about the same with one big partition?

System specs

ABIT KR7A-RAID
40GB Maxtor D740X x2 RAID 0
Windows XP Professional

I have noticed a good increase in speed since I broke my 40gig drive into 2 partitions. SiSoft Sandra confirms it, 22000 before - 26000 after. I think its because the drive can find data faster in smaller partitions. Go for it.

Also set your pagefile on the second partition.

It may slow you down if you put the page file on a different partition on the same drive. You want to put the page file on a different drive if you have one, if you don't have a second drive leave the page file alone. If you put it on the same drive the heads will have to do more work then if they are on seperate drives.

perhaps, but if you set it to a fixed size then it [the pagefile] won't get fragmented & windows won't keep changing its mind about how big it wants it to be so it balances out. [plus it depends on how far out into the disk the pagefile is - mine's on partion no. 2 of 6 (1st 1 is about 5GB, 2nd is just over 4GB) ]

On a related matter, am I the only 1 who is really narked that the nt/2k/xp version of Speed Disk [& every other defragger I've tried so far [for XP] is unable to move the pagefile to the beginning of the partition? [like Speed Disk can in 9x/ME]

I refuse to infect my box with anything "Norton".

As far as the pagefile goes: if the drive heads have to move from the inner part of the drive (partition 1) to the outer part of the drive (partiton 2) you will lose performance. The leas amount of movement the drive heads has to make(same partition), the better the performance will be. Unless those heads are on a seperate drive, then they are working at the same time as the the heads on the first drive. Any time you put the pagefile on a different partition on the same drive you will lose performance simlply because the heads has to R/W on the OS partition and then move across the drive to R/W to the pagefile on the other partition and then move back to the OS partiton.

Not everything made by Norton is bad, Infact the 9x/ME version of Speed Disk is the best defragger I've ever used, which is why it's so annoying that the XP v. of SD is so lame. Also Norton Uninstaller Deluxe for 9x/ME was pretty useful too, & is still quite good under XP, depsite the fact that in XP some of the characters in it's menus are corrupted.

It's Nortons disk utilitys that I have had the most problems with. I'm not sure how they are under 9x because I've been using NT then W2k then XP sence '97.

Ah, well then, in that case you're forgiven. Norton's versions of stuff for NT-based versions of windows do tend to be somewhat on the sucky side.

If you do a read check with hdtach, you'll see the speed at the beginning of the media (outer track) is considerably faster than the inside. My 120gxp gets 48meg/sec on the outer, and 22meg/sec on the inner.

So, if you limit all your system files to the outer tracks, there's no way a defragger or windows update can ever move them to the inner tracks. Personally, I give Win NT5.1 no more than 3gig (usually under), and Winme not more than 2.5gig.

My windows & progs partition is only 5GB & the 2nd [of 6] partition [where I keep my pagefile] is only about 4.3GB, so it's not right @ the end of the [30GB] drive, & if a defragger can do it in 98 it should be able to do it in XP.

In my RAID setup, I just leave it as one huge partition. Works fine. I probably could partition it, but it's almost more of a hassle to so I just leave it as one big one.

I think ScanDisk (chkdsk) and Disk Defragmenter takes longer to run on bigger partitions so I break up big hard drives.

Yes it does, however you will still need to defrag if you have data on all the parititions. You probably can run a 3rd party defragger on multiple drives, but the built in Windows defragger doesn't have that capability.

True, but if 1 or more of the other partitions are just for storage & the contents don't change often then they need to be defragged less often.