Does partitioning a hard drive increase performance?

I just ordered a 2 Tb WD internal hard drive, and will be migrating/cloning a Win7 drive with about 600 gigs of data on it. This new WD will be the only hdd on the computer (HP Pavillion P6650z, 4 gigs RAM, Athlon II X2 3Ghz cpu).

I know there are other reasons for partitioning, but the only reason I'm interested in partitioning this WD is for the sake of increasing performance. Would making, say a C partition with 200 gigs for the OS and programs, and a D partition for the rest (1.8 Tb) for files, improve the performance at all?

 

While this may be all and great, do you really have 2TB of stuff you need? Either way, when the drive goes SOUTH, you will have nothing. Couple 500 or couple of 1TB is the way I would go. One for everything and one for backups if you have that much.

 

No. Not really. It is true the outer tracks contain more data (larger circumference = more data per rotation) but that outer track is there, whether partitioned or not. And files get moved all the time, either by the user, Windows Update and other updaters replacing them, defragging, etc. And regardless, we are talking about a couple milliseconds, if that.

And if you put your OS on the C partition and your applications or data files on the D partition, the drive still only has one set of R/W heads that can only do one thing at a time. So the OS can only access one partition at a time anyway, then has to wait for the R/W head to position itself over the other partition to read the data there. No performance advantage at all!

Partitioning really is just for user convenience - if set up properly. But sadly, they frequently are not setup properly and we see this all the time as users complain of running out of space on the C partition when they still have 100s of gigabytes of free space on the drive, just in the wrong partition.

With two separate hard drives, however, the OS knows how to access both drives at once so it can, and will write to one drive and read from the other drive at the same time with no problems, or read from both or write to both simultaneously.

There are many experts who advise you do NOT partition SSDs and I agree with that. If you don't partition, the SSD maintenance routines (TRIM, wear leveling, etc.) can use the entire drive to ensure maximum life of the whole drive. Not so if you partition it.

 

Not a performance enhancement, but partitioning a HDD can lessen the chance of losing your stored files, if separate from an OS that becomes corrupted. Having the OS on a SSD and storing your files on a HDD is a better idea.

 

Or better yet (in terms of drive reliability) OS on one SSD and files on another SSD. With no moving parts, a SSD is much more likely to last years longer than a HD. A current generation SSD, that is.