Whats the fuss about different partition for gaming?

[apoyusiken]

I see some people are creating a partition around 100gb for windows and installing games and apps in the other partition, why the hell would you do that? I had a 100gb ssd and 500 gb hdd a few years ago and it was annoying as hell.

[porina]

Partitions on one drive: not come across that one. There was one proposal that almost made sense to me but it requires separate drives for OS and games. The idea being if you ever need to nuke the OS you don't have to redownload all the games again. Dunno if the partition method would also enable that.

[Blue4130]

18 minutes ago, porina said:

 Dunno if the partition method would also enable that.

It does. and that is why many people do it. Reinstalling the OS is much easier if you can nuke only the OS partition.

[Mark Kaine]

20 minutes ago, porina said:

Partitions on one drive: not come across that one.

Pretty much all prebuilts do this... But yeah it makes sense if you need reinstall.

[porina]

3 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Pretty much all prebuilts do this... But yeah it makes sense if you need reinstall.

I was talking specifically about one for OS and one for games like OP said. Not like the case of prebuilts where there's usually a recovery partition and then the user partition.

 

6 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

It does. and that is why many people do it. Reinstalling the OS is much easier if you can nuke only the OS partition.

Somehow I manage to avoid reinstalls at all costs since it takes forever to configure an OS and software just how I like it. Some have suggested imaging the system after setting it up 1st time, which might have some merit if I ever get around to it.

[GuiltySpark_]

I don’t know anyone who does this anymore, not with SSDs. Different drives for the operating system and games, yes, but screwing around with partitions is just a pain in the butt.

[Imakuni]

1 hour ago, apoyusiken said:

I see some people are creating a partition around 100gb for windows and installing games and apps in the other partition, why the hell would you do that? I had a 100gb ssd and 500 gb hdd a few years ago and it was annoying as hell.

I kinda do this, though I keep my apps in the OS partition. It's pretty handy for when you want to just nuke the OS and install windows from scratch, you don't need to bother moving your files / games out of it since it's already in a separate thing.

 

Not sure why people say it's annoying... it works exactly the same as if it was all in one partition, the only difference is you click "D:" instead of "Desktop" when you want to access your stuff.

[freeagent]

I don't bother with partitions anymore. But that is why I did, so I didn't have to download my games again. Nowadays I just have windows on one SSD, and an SSD for games, another for apps/music/pix/vids, mostly games though as I have a few TB installed.

[Poinkachu]

The 2 main reasons I did it back then :

1. Don't have to worry about downloaded files when I need to nuke OS. Installed softwares sometimes will work after nuking OS sometimes not, depends on the software whether it needs registry entry or not, but atleast the installers won't have to be redownloaded. Plus for some softwares it was easy enough to backup the specific registry entry and reapply it after.

 

2a. Backup drive for OS doesn't need to be big. (I still have the 250gb drive that I used for OS backup through cloning)

 

2b. OS Image (if the backup is done through imaging) size is smol.

 

Though I allocated more than 100gb for OS.

 

If you ever live in somewhere the internet either suck arse and/or expensive AF, especially if it doesn't come with unlimited data, and PC parts price is silly once past a certain point it's just a smarter move in a way.

 

Back then 1TB drive pricing here is more than 2x 500gb ones, now it's quite linear up to 2tb, 4tb though..... hoo boy.

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, porina said:

was talking specifically about one for OS and one for games

Yeah I haven't seen it for games either, it makes some sense though, but just getting a second hard drive makes more sense I guess.

 

Also note some games prefer being on the OS drive or an nvme,so that's also a consideration. 

[Dedayog]

2 hours ago, apoyusiken said:

I see some people are creating a partition around 100gb for windows and installing games and apps in the other partition, why the hell would you do that? I had a 100gb ssd and 500 gb hdd a few years ago and it was annoying as hell.

How was 2 drives annoying as hell?  Not understanding the over dramatic aspect of your question.

 

I have run multiple drives for more than a decade now and enjoy the ease of reinstalling Windows or compartmentalizing my libraries.  Having the ability to reformat a drive and not download 2TB of games... priceless.

 

Not to mention documents or other data copies kept locally.  Like having 2 filing cabinets, but then again I like organization.

[Mark Kaine]

1 minute ago, Dedayog said:

How was 2 drives annoying as hell?  Not understanding the over dramatic aspect of your question.

 

I have run multiple drives for more than a decade now and enjoy the ease of reinstalling Windows or compartmentalizing my libraries.  Having the ability to reformat a drive and not download 2TB of games... priceless.

 

Not to mention documents or other data copies kept locally.  Like having 2 filing cabinets, but then again I like organization.

Yeh. The more drives the better...imo 

[anothertealtiger]

Oh God, when I had my first gaming(*) PC back in like, 2011 or so I took my hard drive, which couldn't have been anything over 500GB, and partitioned it like 4 different ways. Think I gave Windows like, what... 60GB? It was a bad call, but I think that was more down to the numbers I gave the individual partitions, and the fact that I wasn't partitioning a large drive. Nowadays I just have more hard drives then I have sense so I've basically taken that concept and supersized it.

 

So *clearly* the meta play is to just get a bajillion TB hard drive and chop it up, right? /s

[NoLeafClover]

Having multiple partitions is very much still a thing, SSD or no SSD, and an extremely sensible thing to do. The notion of isolating the OS from the user data, regardless if "data" is just games or any combination of non-OS user files, still applies to modern hardware.

 

The obvious immediate benefit is, as already pointed out, you can reinstall the OS without having to worry about your data being deleted in the process.

 

A secondary benefit is that you don't have to set fire to your hard earned cash for additional SSD storage just to get that separation.

 

Then, if you have money to spend on multiple drives, you can actually do something more useful with them, like set them up as a RAID array for fault tolerance. Yes, it will decrease the usable space, but at least a dead drive won't mean your data is forever gone (unless ofc you have a backup somewhere else).

 

Partitions are really not that difficult to deal with these days. Even the extremely primitive disk manager on Windows can do a decent job at resizing them. Granted, having a think about how many and what for is a useful exercise. Going overkill on the number of partitions does not provide any significant benefits.

[manikyath]

there's a few benefits to partitioning:

- organization: wether you might care or even find it annoying, some people just like to have D for documents, S for steam, and the recycle bin for ubisoft.

- fragmentation (in the olden spinning rust days..): with windows and documents being fairly file edit heavy, it can make sense to separate out the mostly static stuff to reduce just how much stuff your system has to juggle around to keep organized

- seek times (again, spinning rust days): there was a slight performance benefit to slice spinning rust up, so that files that are commonly used together (aka, all the files of a game) are closer together

- you can safely nuke your C drive without losing any data. (dont forget to symlink out your user profile...)

[jmwhite33]

4 hours ago, GuiltySpark_ said:

I don’t know anyone who does this anymore, not with SSDs. Different drives for the operating system and games, yes, but screwing around with partitions is just a pain in the butt.

???

It takes literally seconds to create, format, or delete partitions.

 

I do the whole set everything up, image the OS drive or partition. I update the image's about every month.

Doing that has allowed me to literally try a dozen different things on my system in a couple hours and always able to bring it back to it's original working config. Takes about 10 minutes to create an image/restore my OS drive.

Also saved my system once because on a whim I created an image of just the EFI partition. A week later I had a blunder and had to use it to restore it and boot the pc. 

 

On my old school set-up with DOS the 80 gig drive (smallest I had available) is partioned into about 10 partitions due to the 2gig limit.

 

also no modern Widows OS will "work" on a 100 gig partition. I think the actual smallest size so everything actually works as intended is ~250 gigs.

Documentation says 60 or so, but seriously?

Didn't a Windows update a few months ago fail because the OS partition had to be 250 gigs in order to apply the update.

Maybe OP is thinking of the EFI partition.

[jmwhite33]

I also redirect the Downloads and Documents folders to another drive so I don't have to mess with them if I have to re-image the OS drive.

[GuiltySpark_]

1 hour ago, jmwhite33 said:

I do the whole set everything up, image the OS drive or partition. I update the image's about every month.

Yeah I want no parts of that. I just use the OS and if there is a problem a few years later, wipe it and install fresh. 

 

Most users have no interest in that level of management.

[apoyusiken]

5 hours ago, Imakuni said:

I kinda do this, though I keep my apps in the OS partition. It's pretty handy for when you want to just nuke the OS and install windows from scratch, you don't need to bother moving your files / games out of it since it's already in a separate thing.

 

Not sure why people say it's annoying... it works exactly the same as if it was all in one partition, the only difference is you click "D:" instead of "Desktop" when you want to access your stuff.

the thing that triggered me was giving the os 100gb

[apoyusiken]

4 hours ago, Dedayog said:

How was 2 drives annoying as hell?  Not understanding the over dramatic aspect of your question.

 

I have run multiple drives for more than a decade now and enjoy the ease of reinstalling Windows or compartmentalizing my libraries.  Having the ability to reformat a drive and not download 2TB of games... priceless.

 

Not to mention documents or other data copies kept locally.  Like having 2 filing cabinets, but then again I like organization.

the thing was having only 100 gb for the os (as the external was hdd i wanted to install apps on the ssd)

 

nothing wrong with 2 drives now i have 4 drives, but i would never partition my drive

[Imakuni]

18 minutes ago, apoyusiken said:

the thing that triggered me was giving the os 100gb

100gb is more than plenty. I gave mine 150; 1y later, I deeply regret it, I should have given it only 120.

 

[freeagent]

The only downside to running multiple drives is the way they get grouped in task manager haha.. really grinds my gears for some reason.. I just have learned to deal with it.

 

[ewitte]

I do this for virtual servers, usually I do 120GB unless there is need for more.  The only separations I have with my desktops is with different drives. 

[anothertealtiger]

4 hours ago, manikyath said:

(dont forget to symlink out your user profile...)

[NoLeafClover]

3 hours ago, freeagent said:

The only downside to running multiple drives is the way they get grouped in task manager haha.. really grinds my gears for some reason.. I just have learned to deal with it.

If I were to guess, the "Disk N" is the order of the drives depending on the underlying hardware topology and physical socket they are connected to, the exception being the C-drive. It's not uncommon that disk drives are enumerated based on the HW topology.

 

As for the letters, they will tend to represent the order in which the drives were first identified and mounted by Windows. For example you first connect a drive to Port 3 and it gets a letter assigned, subsequently connecting a drive to Port 2 will assign the next available letter. This is so that any full (absolute) path references already used can remain stable.

 

You can reassign them as you wish from the Windows disk manager, but beware of possible breakage where something already expects a file at given path that is now under a different letter.