2 comments

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  Jeff Clark

  4 years ago

  That makes sense when it comes to multi-user machines, but what about single-user home machines? Is it still a good idea in this case?
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  Aaron Brazell

  4 years ago

  On a single user machine, this is not a requirement. It’s not a requirement in enterprise, but I think it’s better. I agree with this emailer who responded to the Lockergnome post, but I only agree in a non-multiuser environment:
  
  
  
  
  
  No, the reason that dual-partition images are old school is that two is far too few! ;-)
  
  
  
  
  
  Seriously: I’ve found that Windows machines perform FAR better when the drive is partitioned in smaller pieces. One prominent principle is that you need to keep free space near to where it will be needed. For this reason, you’ll get better performance by putting the user’s profile and major application directories on separate partitions. Partitions can still be linked (via Win2k’s path mounting) to the same place in the file tree, and can be (to neophytes) indistinguishable from directories on the C: partition.
  
  
  
  
  
  Similary, swap performance can be enhanced by giving swap its own partition near the start of the drive. (Rule of thumb: swap should be near or in the most-used partition on the least-used hard drive.)
  
  
  
  
  
  E-mail and other major applications will each benefit from having separate partitions, which are now easier to utilize because they can be mounted and made to look like regular directories. I would consider moving the entire “Program Files” tree to its own partition.
  
  
  
  
  
  And you get double points if you can do this across two or more drives.
  
  
  
  
  
  The side benefit is that a scrambled root partition should require re-imaging only the root partition, leaving all the user’s profile and other data intact in the separate partitions.
  
  
  
  
  
  Furthermore, this will reduce the need for defragmentation, thereby giving you an additional day-to-day performance boost.
  
  
  
  
  
  Try it on your own system. Find the 3 largest directories on your drive (e-mail? user profile? ) and segregate them into separate partitions. (FullDisk http://www.worldlynx.net/pgerhart/_fuldsk.html can help with the analysis.) It will make a big difference in your daily computing experience.