Should I create more paritions for my HD ??

[ramhead]

I am planning to snap in a 40Gb ata 100 7200rpm External Hard Drive permanently to my Windows 2000 PC. Since I am planning to store all my downloaded apps etc to this drive.

May i know will I be better off if I leave my Drive as one single parition og 40GB or should I chop the drive into serveral partitions.

Moreoover, should I use the FAt32 file format or should i use the NTFS format ??

Please advise kindly.

[piyopiyo13]

Partitions can be a major hassle in that you might end up not having enough space on any single drive to install a program (though you have enough if all the free space was put together), but are good for organization. Normally I only partition if I plan on installing multiple OS's, but it's not uncommon for people to partition, say, a drive for MP3's and videos. It's really up to you whether you partition or not.

Here's an overview of the differences between the two:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/columns/russel/october01.asp

Here's a more in-depth article regarding the differences between FAT32 and NTFS:
http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=63

[vibe666]

I think you shouls take that nice 40GB ATA100 7200RPM hard drive out of the case and go and put it inside your system on the end of a nice ATA100 cable. even if you don't have a MoBo that will support ATA100 you'll still get a **** sight better performance out of the thing having it on a normal IDE cable than having it dangling off of a USB cable outside your systm box.

And to answer your original question it depends on what and how much data you are talking about.

if you have cable or DSL then go for it and have one partition for MP3's, one for Apps and one for Movies or similar, depending on what you'll be downloading.

if you don't intend to be downloading GB's of data then don't bother. it's only really necessary if you plan on doing complicated things with the drive.

***viBe***
Why not put your PC's idle time to good use by downloading the seti@home client HERE (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/windows.html) and then joining the Sysopt.com Users 2002 Team HERE (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd=team_lookup&name=Sysopt.com+Users+2002)

[ramhead]

Thanks for all for your input.

Since it is running at USB 2.0 and also I have no more drive bay, that's why I use this route.

I think I will leave it as one single partition and use NTFS.

Anyhow, have a nice weekend, guys.

[G]

I would strongly recommend that you do not have your OS (active partition) using the NTFS format. If for any reason you get in to trouble, you will have real difficulty assessing the hard disk drive. It is true that NTFS is more secure, so I have read, but even this point (there may be other considerations) should not convince you to go this way.

If I were you I would have my OS (active partition) as, at most FAT32 (even this can cause problems too, but at least you have more of a chance of getting access to the OS partition. The partition for applications and the like can then be installed or downloaded on to NTFS partitions.

I could go on and on about partitions but I will let you read up on it. The tools to access NTFS require a level of expertise, expense, and experience too. It is just not worth all the inconvenience if things go horribly wrong. It is entirely up to you how you proceed though.

Unless your internal HDD is adequate then I would invest in a larger HDD and partitioning it up. Going for a single partition, let alone being of NTFS format, is a mistake. Get the external USB HDD, if you like, later.

If you partition the internal drive correctly then all you downloaded material can go on a separate partition and so will be fine any way.

Have you thought of purchasing an internal CD-RW? You can take this to a new system in the future and in time when you get yourself a new system with more HDD bays you can have a couple of HDDs. This is what I have and two HDDs are better than one.

If you wish to discuss different possibilities, post away. The more knowledge you can acquire the better.

All the best,
G

[vibe666]

using an NTFS partition on a hard drive won't make it any harder to access than a FAT32 partition as long as the OS (Win2K in your case) can handle it. Not only that but it is more reliable when things on a system go wrong than FAT32 is. the security issue only becomes relavent if you decide to actually protect the data on the drive from being read or written to. Anyway, since you are talking about an external USB HD you won't be booting from it anyway.

in any case even if you use NTFS as your boot partition on your main HD, in the unlikely event that something does go wrong, you will have your Win2K boot disks to get the system up and running again which anyone with any sense will have made when they first installed the OS.

***viBe***
Why not put your PC's idle time to good use by downloading the seti@home client HERE (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/windows.html) and then joining the Sysopt.com Users 2002 Team HERE (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd=team_lookup&name=Sysopt.com+Users+2002)

[G]

Well what you say is true, to a point, and I am sure you know more about this than me. However, does ramhead? Your point relating to the fact that if a user gets in to trouble they can use their Win2000 boot disk would be sound if that’s all it would take, and this is not so for all eventualities. Moreover, if the Win2000 boot disk or Emergency Repair Disk (ERD) is any thing like WinNT’s then it can make matters much worst. The main consolation is that Win2000 seems to be more stable and suffer less unrecoverable system boot failures than WinNT.

I still would not go with the NTFS format on a bootable partition but everyone has there own options. If ramhead does go the NTFS way, I hope it is a painless one.

All the best,
G