Posted by Unknown | Posted in Windows | Posted on 12:21 PM
More Partitions = Data Parachute?
Some users advocate using multiple partitions for safety reasons. Their opinion is that in the event of a hard disk crash, corruption to the boot sector or FAT (File Allocation Tables), only the primary partition will be lost, leaving precious data safe in the other partitions.
Unfortunately, from my experience involving hard disk crashes, every partition was inevitably wiped out. When a hard disk head crashes with a platter, I seriously doubt it would politely avoid scoring through the media that has been allocated to other partitions.
Russ Johnson, a Product Support Engineer from Symantec Corporation has this to say, "It's not a substitute for a good backup, but it may save you from having to restore all of your data from a backup. However, if your first partition is taken out, more than likely the whole drive will be lost. The first partition is also the location of the Master Boot Record and the partition table."
Now, I agree that storing your data on a different partition is actually a good practice. It can save your data if the first partition gets corrupted due to a soft error. For example, even if the FAT of one of the partitions gets corrupted, data on the other partitions will still be safe.
So, if data integrity (as well as disk management) is important to you, you should consider using multiple partitions. However, this does not mean you should move the paging file to a different partition... oh no...
When the paging file is permanent, tweakers who advocate moving paging files around will tell you to move your partition to a second hard disk. Why?
As the theory goes, this allows your system to access both the paging file on the second hard disk and data on the first hard disk concurrently. This theoretically improves performance a lot! But does it really work?
Well, it depends.
Some users advocate using multiple partitions for safety reasons. Their opinion is that in the event of a hard disk crash, corruption to the boot sector or FAT (File Allocation Tables), only the primary partition will be lost, leaving precious data safe in the other partitions.
Unfortunately, from my experience involving hard disk crashes, every partition was inevitably wiped out. When a hard disk head crashes with a platter, I seriously doubt it would politely avoid scoring through the media that has been allocated to other partitions.
Russ Johnson, a Product Support Engineer from Symantec Corporation has this to say, "It's not a substitute for a good backup, but it may save you from having to restore all of your data from a backup. However, if your first partition is taken out, more than likely the whole drive will be lost. The first partition is also the location of the Master Boot Record and the partition table."
Now, I agree that storing your data on a different partition is actually a good practice. It can save your data if the first partition gets corrupted due to a soft error. For example, even if the FAT of one of the partitions gets corrupted, data on the other partitions will still be safe.
So, if data integrity (as well as disk management) is important to you, you should consider using multiple partitions. However, this does not mean you should move the paging file to a different partition... oh no...
When the paging file is permanent, tweakers who advocate moving paging files around will tell you to move your partition to a second hard disk. Why?
As the theory goes, this allows your system to access both the paging file on the second hard disk and data on the first hard disk concurrently. This theoretically improves performance a lot! But does it really work?
Well, it depends.
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