Partitioning a drive

[Roland]

Hail Lurkers,

My main drive is a 20 gig hard drive (17 gig actual space).  Once it began filling up, I bought a 250 gig hard drive (233 gig actual space) to free up some space on my main drive. My computer had no trouble partitioning the LARGE drive as some thought it might be difficult, but I've been told that a drive that size should be partitioned into smaller drives for maximum efficiency. What do you guys think is the best size drives I should partition? I have been burning a lot of movies lately so bigger would be better, but 250 gig is definitely is too big.  Also, would it be better to “partition” the drive into smaller sections or to use Alcohol 120% to set it up into virtual drives?  I have no experience with this and I'm not even sure how to partition my drive again, lol.

Thanks for any replies ahead of time.

NOTE: I don't have access to a spell-checker at the moment so bear with me please  .
EDIT: I just got home and ran this threw the spell-checker :) .  Clarified a few things.
[right][snapback]58649[/snapback][/right]

My advice, as a computer techie, is not to bother partitioning. The best advice has already been given - if you have a set purpose for which you want to dedicate a portion of the drive to be segregated from the rest of the drive (i.e. a "data" partition on your main drive, where you save all your files that you want to keep, to keep them seperate from the OS in case of a reinstall). Since you don't seem to have any want for doing that, there's no point in partitioning.

The only advice I can give is this: if you want to use the 250 gig drive as your MAIN drive, make a partition of around 40 - 50 gigs, and put your OS and all your programs on that. Then use the rest of the space to store all your "data". Otherwise, just use your current drive as the "main" one and use this as a secondary slave drive to store all your data. You could, alternatively, make a 40 - 50 gig partition on the 250 gig drive dedicated solely for game installations, to keep your main drive from getting too cluttered with games (and thus more dedicated towards actually RUNNING your computer), but that's just a possible option.

To partition, I use FDisk on a bootable diskette. Sometimes the best tools are the simplest. ;) If you're not going to partition, though, just format the drive right in Windows, or alternately you could use FDisk.

Take care and enjoy your drive.