Drive partitions?

[Yezinki]

Hi there,

Is there any advantage in keeping the drive’s partitions Primary, even if one intends to install only a single OS?

Or should only one be Primary active & the rest Logical?

Hoping to hear from you,

Regards!

Yezinki.

[DavidR]

In older IDE drives that was the only option, but in SATA II drives this isn't so strict.

So it depends on what type of drive you have, IDE or SATA II and I guess your OS as FAT32 and NTFS formats are a consideration...

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1778&page=2

[Yezinki]

Thanks.

One is Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB SATA2 7200RPM 8MB .

The other Hitachi HITACHI Travelstar 7K100 HTS721010G9SA00 (0A25016) 100GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 1.5Gb/s Notebook Hard Drive.

Both have NTFS as file system.

What are your thoughts now?

Regards!

[DavidR]

Well both should be capable of having more than one 'primary' partition which really is misnamed now as in the past that was why it was called primary you could only have one, but with sata and ntfs you can have more.

I tend to hedge my bets as I just have one Primary and a couple of logical partitions and a fair bit of space left empty should I need to create another partition be that Primary or logical. If you use up all the space with however many partitions you choose, you would then have to resize a partition/s to create the new one. Most partition managers can resize without destruction, but it is something to be aware of.

So my primary isn't large big enough for the OS and programs, with data files in the others.

Really it depends on what you intend to do with your system as to how many partitions you should have, I don't hold with just having one big one as defraging that could take some time.