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From old times I always remember everybody saying you should separate windows partition from others. I don't see any strong reasons to do that.
I searched a little about this but other than better organizing of my data I can't find any other reasons.
So I wonder is it really a good idea to separate windows partition from others? Does it affect performance in any way? Is it different for small vs large disks?
I'm exclusively talking about latest windows 10 release.

UPDATE
what I mean about separating windows partition from others is you create a partition just for windows and use another partition for installing applications and store other personal data.
I wonder is this behavior affects number of system calls to hard disk and is it faster for operating system to work with multiple small partitions instead of one big partition?

Sнаđошƒаӽ
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dev-masih
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2 Answers2

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In our experience we only partition drives which serve different purposes, e.g.

  • different operating systems,
  • recovery partitions,
  • partitions which are purely going to be used for file sharing or shared storage.

As Windows 10 places all user's folders on the OS partition I see no need to create separate partitions other than in the examples given above.

Another reason might be for data storage where you require a backup job to be simplified, i.e. you only wish to back up the data and to save you having to amend a backup job you just simply point it to the data storage partition.

If you create a 'data' partition it will not be affected by a re-installation of the OS provided you keep the existing partitions during installation.

I have not known it to cause any real performance impact.

Hope all goes well.

SteveP
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The reason most people partition the OS onto a separate partition is in case you need/want to wipe/change your OS. There was also a need to separate the partitions because of the limitations of the filesystems, but that hasn't been an issue for a LONG time. Those issues were that you could only have a set amount of files/folders on a partition at one time, (inodes), or that the filesystem couldn't use up all of the space.

So i wonder is it really a good reason to separate windows partition from others?

The way Windows installs itself, not really. If you have a separate hard drive, then yes installing on the separate drive can greatly increase performance.

is it affected performance in any kind?

No noticeable affect when they're on the same drive. Most seek times are in milliseconds, and usually under 20ms per seek on average.

Is it a difference between small and large size HDDs?

There will only be an issue if the filesystem you're trying to use can't handle the amount of space you have. If you're using the NTFS standard that comes with Windows, it can probably handle it. While sector sizes might increase in the future, the current size puts a limit on a single volume of 2 terabytes (2^32 * 512 bytes, or 2^41 bytes). If you use a cluster size that is greater than 512, (default for windows is 4096, which is 8 times larger than that pages lists), then you can get a lot more storage space out of your system.

I'm exclusively talking about latest windows 10 release.

Doesn't matter which OS you use, the results should be the same.

Blerg
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  • _ While sector sizes might increase in the future, the current size puts a limit on a single volume of 2 terabytes (2^32 * 512 bytes, or 2^41 bytes)._ .. this isn't necessarily true – txtechhelp Jul 04 '17 at 19:25
  • What I linked to, and what you linked to are basically the same. If you take the calculation 2^32 * (64 * 1024), you get the 256TiB that it's talking about. In other words, if you increase the sector size from 512B to 64kiB, then you can get 256TiB worth of space out of a partition. With a cluster size of 512 bytes, the most space you can use is 2TiB. – Blerg Jul 04 '17 at 20:04