partitioning hard drive

[stanlong]

 why bother partitioning or should i say having more than one partition on your hard drive? can any body answer this ? :-?  
I`d really like to know

[zipper]

-keep things organized (easier)
-one crash/mishap doesn't eat everything

for starters

[meega]

Organising things is better done with directories and assigns, imo.

[zipper]

I meant for instance keeping system, applications, games, even cache separate.

[ZeBeeDee]

zipper hit the nail on the head.

If an non-partitioned drive suddenly has a problem, the chances are you will loose everything stored on it.

A partitioned drive should give you the opportunity to rescue important data (which should be stored on a non-system partition anyway).

Also, partitioning allows more ease of use and arrangement of programs.

@meega

Assigns? Why not simply create a batch file that assigns the relevant disks when needed? No need to clutter up memory with assign commands that aren't used all the time  :-)

[meega]

Who says I don't already do such things?

And how many assigns can fit into the memory space that would be used by drive buffers?

[ZeBeeDee]

meega wrote:
Who says I don't already do such things?

And how many assigns can fit into the memory space that would be used by drive buffers?

I don't know ... do you? :-)

How many drive buffers are there to begin with? All my assigns are killed upon quitting the application that needed them.

[meega]

Default for a hard drive partition is 30 buffers, iirc, which is 15KB - that's a lot of assigns.

[ZeBeeDee]

That is a lot, but  I'll keep the setup I've got ...

All non-essential assigns are killed unless required, WB boots in just over 6 seconds - counting from first drive access ... I'm happy  :-D

[persia]

I agree there is no point to partitions, they are a poor alternative to a proper backup strategy and unnecessarily split off space.  You eat up precious hard drive space and suddenly you have no room in your work partition and end up storing data in your system partition or whatever.  

Partitioning is a bad idea you can do the same thing with folders and not artificially restrict the group of you system.  Don't do it.

[pVC]

If you're using small backup medias, like cd-r, usb or similar, then it would be good to have system, apps etc on separate partition than rest of the data. It's easier to backup the whole small partition than start selecting what's needed to backup and what's not.

And I wouldn't want to have caches, temp files, downloads etc fragmenting my system and utils partitions. Or in worst cases breaking them.

And with separate partitions it's easier to have multiboot system.

And if you're using old FFS filesystem, the usual validating time is shorter for smaller partitions. Fixing and recovering FFS partitions also work only partitions under 2GB size and which are inside the first 4GB area, so I'd keep important data on small partitions inside those limits. And if you have to fix, check, defragment, recover data, then it's faster if you don't have to scan whole disk, which is really slow on Amiga.

And what's most important in most Amiga systems, your boot partition must be under 2GB size and most partitions work best under 4GB area, so that makes it practically necessary to have at least 2 partitions.

[kvasir]

The whole partitioning thing seems to be a matter of opinion/system setup, and if 1 partition works well on your system I would stick with it. Traditionally, Amigas like to have 2 partitions, 1 for system files (Workbench install, drivers, libraries, etc...), and 1 for applications (office software, internet stuff, games, etc...). Some people like using a temporary file partition, and use that for dumping temp. downloads, internet caches, even virtual memory. I personally have 5 partitions, but thats because I play with emulators alot, so I have the 2 usual Work: and System: partitions is SFS, as well as 2 FAT16 partitions for pc-task (1 for win3.11, 1 for win95, if somebody knows how to get GRUB or something similar working on pc-task, I'll prolly drop that to 1 partition), and a MFS partition for Shapeshifter. Been thinking of setting up a partition for internet cache use, but would be a bit more effort than I have time for these days. But again, if one partition works, I'd just run with that. The nice thing about Amiga is its flexable enough to fit almost anyones personal taste in such matters.

[TiredOLife]

There can be problems with the Ibrowse cache and SFS, so I would recommend a separate partition for the cache.  

[zipper]

That's why I suggested a dedicated partition for cache - which I use as alternate boot partition for CGX system; my default is P96.

[taunusand]

Because of the 2GB limit :-P