Is HDD performance in any way affected by partitioning it?

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ch91woo

New Member
Hello fellow members of the forum, I just had a quick question about partitioning a hard drive. I recently bought a Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM. I was wondering if the hard drive performance would be degraded in any possible way by partitioning the drive in several partitions to install Ubuntu and Windows 7, and also leaving a partition for Data only. Is it possible for the hard drive to under perform because of the partitioning? please help me! Thank you all in advance for answering my question. :D
 
If you have 3 partitions, one for windows, one for ubuntu, one for data, only 2 of the 3 will be accessed at a time.

All the time you are just using ubuntu or just using windows, the speed will be normal. When you are using the data partition too, becasue it will be going from 2 places at once on the same disc, performance will be decreased, but that would be similar if you didn't have the partition, so it probably wouldn't affect too much.

To have them seperate and not have performance decrease, you will have to use seperate hard drives, 1 for data, 1 for ubuntu/windows
 
Thank you for the input, but I had another question.

some people have been telling me that in Windows 7, the cache sizes of hard drives can affect performance noticeably. Is this really true? Right now I have Windows 7 on a hard drive with 7200rpm and 8mb cache. Would it make a difference if I had Windows 7 on a HDD with 7200rpm with 32mb cache?
 
ch91woo said:
Thank you for the input, but I had another question.

some people have been telling me that in Windows 7, the cache sizes of hard drives can affect performance noticeably. Is this really true? Right now I have Windows 7 on a hard drive with 7200rpm and 8mb cache. Would it make a difference if I had Windows 7 on a HDD with 7200rpm with 32mb cache?
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yes it would. However, cache is not everything, nor is spin speed. You are better of finding a hard drive with NCQ (Native Command Queueing), as it speeds up the drive further and can increase the life of the drive, because it chooses the order to take instructions inteligently, so the needle moves less, and it takes less time to retrieve the data.

The hard drive that you bought however will still give a decent increase (or decrease I suppose I should say) in boot times and load times because of that extra cache, even though it doesn't have NCQ
 
Aastii said:
You are better of finding a hard drive with NCQ (Native Command Queueing), as it speeds up the drive further and can increase the life of the drive, because it chooses the order to take instructions inteligently, so the needle moves less, and it takes less time to retrieve the data.
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I searched around the internet about Hard drives with NCQ technology, but it doesn't seem like vendors like to tell customers whether their hard drives support NCQ or not. Is there a way to check this?
 
ch91woo said:
I searched around the internet about Hard drives with NCQ technology, but it doesn't seem like vendors like to tell customers whether their hard drives support NCQ or not. Is there a way to check this?
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I know it is a british site, but you can find the same hard drives in whatever coutry you are in if you aren't british:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/250-...02ABYS-RE3-SATA-300-7200-rpm-16MB-Cache-89-ms

and then scroll down a little to find similar products, check NCQ and then click find. It will list all of the ones on the site with it, which is a pretty comprehensive list with alot of choice from several manufacturers
 
Aastii said:
I know it is a british site, but you can find the same hard drives in whatever coutry you are in if you aren't british:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/250-...02ABYS-RE3-SATA-300-7200-rpm-16MB-Cache-89-ms

and then scroll down a little to find similar products, check NCQ and then click find. It will list all of the ones on the site with it, which is a pretty comprehensive list with alot of choice from several manufacturers
Click to expand...

thank you so much! this is all very informative
 
ch91woo said:
thank you so much! this is all very informative
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no problems :)

If you are after a hard drive with NCQ, I'd recomend the Samsung F3. It is one of the cheapest hard drives with NCQ for the capacity that you get, but the thing is very quick for a hard drive and generally very reliable too
 
assuming the hard drive you have is the WD10EALS, I may be eating my words now, because you are quite right stranglehold, it does have NCQ, by bad there :o
 
SATA II and 3.0 are the same thing. SATA II is the name of the organization that invented SATA. The SATA II name just caught on because of the company name, plus being the second generation SATA. But the true name is SATA 3.0 for the 3Gb/s transfer rate. They/the company later changed there name to SATA-IO or Serial ATA International Organization.

Really they are just SATA 1.0 have no idea why is wasnt called 1.5/ SATA 3.0 and now SATA 6.0. SATA I and SATA II are just really wrong names for 1.0 and 3.0
 
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StrangleHold said:
SATA II and 3.0 are the same thing. SATA II is the name of the organization that invented SATA. The SATA II name just caught on because of the company name, plus being the second generation SATA. But the true name is SATA 3.0 for the 3Gb/s transfer rate. They/the company later changed there name to SATA-IO or Serial ATA International Organization.
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I was referring more to rev3 as in 6GB/s
 
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