Do Partition Slow Down My Computer?

[Risknothin]

I want to partition my 80gig HD would that slow down my computer and if not what would be the best program to use?

[3rd gen noob]

if you want a new partition solely for storage then it will not slow down your system. it may actually increase speeds, especially the time taken to defrag/virus scan

try using partition magic 8

[scott_hedrick]

If you are using FAT or FAT32 (The filesystem on Windows 95/98/ME), then you will notice a large speed increase if you have a lot of small partitions. This is due to the fact that these filesystems cannot address large partitions without huge cluster sizes, which will waste a LOT of sapce.

However, if you use Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 then your speed difference will be negligible unless you organsie your disk in a way that helps the OS, for instance, by creating a separate partition for Windows itself, and one for or two the page file(s).

In general, partitioning is a good idea, but with only 80GB there isn't much to be gained unless you plan on formatting etc, so that you can have a partition where your data stays regardless of how many times you format the windows partition.

Scott