I am in the planning stages of partitioning a new 120GB HDD for use in an XP system.

I have read that it is not efficient to divide into 'too' many NTFS partitions.

My question is: what constitutes 'too' many on a drive of this size? Is ten reasonable?

I would like to prevent the partitions getting 'too' large so that it won't take all night to defrag. Obviously there is a trade-off here, but some pointers for a noob would be appreciated.

Thanks.

honestly, ive always followed a set of 4 rule...im sure you can put however many you want, but 4 is a good number, dunno why, but I never split more than that.

A good place to look about it:

http://partition.radified.com/

I only use 2 partitions: 1 for Windows (10GB) and 1 for DATA (150GB). I grouped everything in folders:

\movies

\music

\software

\games

\mydocuments (this is NOT the folder created by Windows)

...and that's it.

Thank you for your input(s).

Of course you can just use ONE partition if you so desire.

I plan to have FOUR OSs so, obviously, I will have at least SIX partitions.

(I don't really want an OS on the FAT 32 drive 'C' - just the boot files and any DOS utils I may need.)

Let me quote from my first post:

'My question is: what constitutes 'too' many on a drive of this size?'

In other words: at what point do NTFS partitions become a hindrance rather than a help?

One of my IDE 120 GB HDs has 10 partitions: 3 prim for OSes and the rest ext. logical for data, backup, VMWare, etc. My 2nd 120 HD has 5 partitions. My 3rd and 4th HDs are setup as RAID.

Everyone's need is different and my setup works for me. It's never caused any "hindrance" to me, whatever that is, except that the lists of drives in Disk Management and other dialogue boxes are rather long.

And where you have to configure a setting for a particular drive - like system restore and Recycle Bin, it can be tedious to go through them all - but then you only need to do this once.

You lose a "tiny" amount of disk space for the extended boot record and ext. partition tables the more ext. logical drives you have.

It really depends on what your needs are. For video, you should have large partitions (as on my 2nd HD).

Edited June 18, 200521 yr by Takeshi