250 GB External Hard drive - How to partition

[sakumar79]

Hi all,
I have recently purchased a Seagate 250 GB Harddisk (a PATA HD with external casing). Planning to use for backup purposes at office and home. Wondering how to partition it...

1. NTFS or FAT32? At office a few computers are Win9x but most others are on NT-based... Thinking may be 1 partition of 1GB size for temporarily storing data from FAT32 based computers... Should that be enough? Is it better performance-wise to have the FAT32 partition as first partition or last partition?

2. Limits for partition size? I will be storing Office Data and Home Data... Office data will be drawings, design calculation files, administrative files, lectures files, etc... Home Data will include Pictures, Music, ?Movies? (probably not), personal data for each family member (currently 5 main users), etc... Partition size should be large enough to store data future-proof, but must be easy to maintain while defragging...

Personal experience will be appreciated.

Thx in advance
Arun

[wizrulz]

See fat 32 cannot support for say more than 32 GB...in short....If you need to format a volume that is larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system to format it.

NTFS is way way better than FAT32 in nearly all aspects....

U say u have 250 gb....

so u can 10 gb as fat32 and rest partition as say 60 gb each 4 partitions

[dissel]

actually you are not getting 250 GB....you are getting 232 GB online.

So I will prefer 32 GB for Fat32...If you ever think to use Linux as any where or your friends do....then your HDD can easily talk(read/write/excute) with those machine, NTFS(read by default) write is still a hardle for linux.

and rest 200 GB goes to NTFS...with 50 x 4 equal.

Thats it.

[nishant_nms]

whatever u like u may do as it will suit ur requirements

[sakumar79]

Thanks for all replies... But also inform whether it is better to have FAT32 partition as first or last in the drive...

Arun

[go4saket]

It doesnt matter at all.

[~Phenom~]

Originally Posted by wizrulz

See fat 32 cannot support for say more than 32 GB...in short....If you need to format a volume that is larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system to format it.

NTFS is way way better than FAT32 in nearly all aspects....

U say u have 250 gb....

so u can 10 gb as fat32 and rest partition as say 60 gb each 4 partitions

u r wrong buddy. fat32 can support more than 32 GB partitions.
I also have 250 GB HDD and my partitions are as follows:
25 GB for windows XP SP2
25 GB for linux
50 GB for songs
50 GB for movies
50 GB for softwares
50 GB for other random stuff.

[wizrulz]

Originally Posted by ~Phenom~

u r wrong buddy. fat32 can support more than 32 GB partitions.
I also have 250 GB HDD and my partitions are as follows:
25 GB for windows XP SP2
25 GB for linux
50 GB for songs
50 GB for movies
50 GB for softwares
50 GB for other random stuff.

dude....the performance will take a beating.....simple...

Windows 2000 and Windows XP can read and write to FAT32 filesystems of any size, but the format program on these platforms can only create FAT32 filesystems up to 32 GB.
You cannot format a volume larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size using the FAT32 file system during the Windows XP installation process. Windows XP can mount and support FAT32 volumes larger than 32 GB (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB by using the Format tool during Setup. If you need to format a volume that is larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system to format it.

[~Phenom~]

^^by increasing the value of LVM to 48 bit. format tools in XP also support partitions larger than 32 GB. And u talking about performance , my PC runs faster than Core 2 Duo with my p4 2.4 GHz.

[wizrulz]

Originally Posted by ~Phenom~

^^by increasing the value of LVM to 48 bit. format tools in XP also support partitions larger than 32 GB. And u talking about performance , my PC runs faster than Core 2 Duo with my p4 2.4 GHz.

Boot time with FAT32 is increased in hard drives larger then 32 GB because of the time required to read all of the FAT structure. This must be done to calculate the amount of free space when the volume is mounted. Read/write performance with FAT32 is affected because the file system must determine the free space on the disk through the small views of the massive FAT structure. This leads to inefficiencies in file allocation.