I have a new laptop arriving in the next day or so. I’m mainly a linux user, but as this new laptop has Windows 7 on it I’ll want to keep that on a partition.
The harddrive is 550gb, so I’m thinking of dedicating 100gb to Win7, 125gb to media, 100gb to shared documents (may sound excessive but too much is better than too little, especially with the hastle of resizing!) and 150gb to Ubuntu - with 100gb left for toying with other Linux distros.
What I’m wondering is the effects that this will have on the laptop’s performance. Would accessing documents on the current partition be slower if other partitions are available? Would accessing documents on a different partition be slower?
Also, with Ubuntu it is a matter of a few clicks to mount a partition and map it to a directory. How easy is this with Windows 7? Is it also possible to map ‘My Pictures’ with PartitionX/Pictures, ‘My Music’ with PartitionX/Music etc?
Before you could make so many partitions there are a couple of things to consider. First and fore most there is a max of 4 partitions without using an extended partitions. You probably would not see much drop in performance with or without partitions then you already do. You want to keep the boot code as close to the start of the drive as possible. This location is often the faster area to be read.
Changing My * folders is very easy in Windows 7 just go to the folders Properties then Location tab. Can do this for almost all location relative to you. Or you can skip that and just use Libraries to merge all the available locations into one view.
Not in Windows Vista or Windows 7. They are all separated in a user’s directory
Partitioning on the same drive doesn’t do much beyond just separating the data. As long as you defrag once in a while, you won’t notice a performance difference between a drive with multiple partitions and a drive with only one partition.
There is, however, a side benefit to partitioning your drive–if you need to reformat the O/S, your data files will still be safely stored on a separate partition, which would not be affected by the reformat.
As for remapping, you can remap “My Documents” if you right click on “My Documents” and click “Properties”. “My Pictures” etc. are simply shortcuts to the folders in “My Documents”, so you can’t move them from “My Documents”.
