Hard Drive Partions - Do I, Don't I, and If So, How?

[Blueprudence]

At the bottom of my order screen is a button about Hard Drive Partitions and the page it leads too asks me about how I want my disks partitioned?

I'm totally out of my league with this, please could someone advise?

The system has a 120Gb SSD for a speedy boot up but apparently only needs 80Gb (I'm going for Win 7 Home Premium 64bit) and a 2Tb WD Caviar as a second drive. I won't be messing about with dual boots or Linux or anything. The machine is for gaming, home accounts, bit of web design, surfing, etc, etc. Normal gaming machine with standard home computing on top really.

How should I ask PCS to set this up?

 

[tom_gr7]

just leave it as normal mate,

ssd as drive one for the OS+programs, if ya have space then a few games

Hdd as drive two for other stuff, games/media that kinda thing.

 

[Blueprudence]

Marvellous Tom, thank you so much for the speedy advice.

 

[Diem]

Thanks Tom - also something I was thinking about

 

[Wolvo7]

Yeah it's not really needed with a 120GB drive. Ideally you'd create a partition for your OS and programs and another or multiple others for whatever else you'd be adding on the disk but as you already have a 2nd drive for your data there's no real need for it.

An OS+programs partition would have the advantage of allowing the creation of another one for multi-boot but you said you won't be doing that. It also allows the creation of an image backup of just the OS and apps in case you want to wipe out and restore the partition without affecting your data files.

What you could do is partition your data HDD ie one partition for movies, one for games, one for music etc.. You'd typically do that for better organization of your data and for protection against corruption, so that if one partition becomes corrupted it may not affect the others. Not essential though, depends if you consider that important. You can always have a look online at the pros and cons of partitioning.

 

[xiecs]

As a slight diversion from the main topic, how many of you switch the public and private Documents, Pictures, Music and Video folders off the C: drive onto the Data disk? I tend to switch my private folders off but leave the public foders on the C: drive.

 

[Buzz]

I personally only ever have Op system and program files on my C: drive. Everything else gets partitioned and put into its own designated space. For me it just makes everything safer along with less space taken up on the system drive.