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I've had a new 60G hard drive sitting in my office for about a month now. I bought it before I realized I needed a new BIOS that would support a disk that size, so had to wait for the BIOS chip to arrive - which it did the day before I left for the Thanksgiving holiday and there was no way I was going to try to fool around with it in that short amount of time. Of course, returning from vacation, I had a few projects that I had to accomplish before I could get back to fooling around with my computer.
I got the new hard drive because I keep filling up my current disk at an alarming rate and then get the "disk full" message in Photoshop (because the temp file has grown so large) and there's no way for me to save me work. Ugh.
I finally installed the new BIOS chip and got everything working earlier this week. Since then, I've been trying to figure out if I need/should/want to partition the new disk. At first I thought I'd just add it as one big second disk to store all of my photo projects on (as well as use it for the Photoshop scratch file), leaving my current disk (13G) as the system disk. But then I got to thinking that I should use the new disk as my system disk because it's faster (and therefore the swap file access should be faster, right?)
So, I thought that perhaps I'd make 2 partitions on the new disk: one with all of the system/program files and the second for all of my user files. In that case, I could use my current disk as a backup for the system partition in case the unthinkable happens. But if I do that, then what size do I make the system partition? I know it includes the swap file, but I want to leave enough room to add other applications - I just don't know how many that might be in the future. If I don't fill it up, then it's "wasted" space, but if I do fill it up, then I'm pretty much hosed. Right? And Tim's comment about having to live with my partitions for a "long, long time" has me rethinking my current strategy.
I guess I'd like to hear other's experiences as to whether they've partitioned or not - and why. Plus, any other advice would be most helpful. My current file management scheme is through directories and has worked fine for me over the years. I can usually find a file I'm looking for pretty easily. So partitioning as a way to manage my files isn't particularly attractive to me. However, partitioning to make backups easier/simpler or to reduce disk fragmentation are positives in my mind (if in fact partitioning really helps with these things.)
Thanks, Jeanie
I got the new hard drive because I keep filling up my current disk at an alarming rate and then get the "disk full" message in Photoshop (because the temp file has grown so large) and there's no way for me to save me work. Ugh.
I finally installed the new BIOS chip and got everything working earlier this week. Since then, I've been trying to figure out if I need/should/want to partition the new disk. At first I thought I'd just add it as one big second disk to store all of my photo projects on (as well as use it for the Photoshop scratch file), leaving my current disk (13G) as the system disk. But then I got to thinking that I should use the new disk as my system disk because it's faster (and therefore the swap file access should be faster, right?)
So, I thought that perhaps I'd make 2 partitions on the new disk: one with all of the system/program files and the second for all of my user files. In that case, I could use my current disk as a backup for the system partition in case the unthinkable happens. But if I do that, then what size do I make the system partition? I know it includes the swap file, but I want to leave enough room to add other applications - I just don't know how many that might be in the future. If I don't fill it up, then it's "wasted" space, but if I do fill it up, then I'm pretty much hosed. Right? And Tim's comment about having to live with my partitions for a "long, long time" has me rethinking my current strategy.
I guess I'd like to hear other's experiences as to whether they've partitioned or not - and why. Plus, any other advice would be most helpful. My current file management scheme is through directories and has worked fine for me over the years. I can usually find a file I'm looking for pretty easily. So partitioning as a way to manage my files isn't particularly attractive to me. However, partitioning to make backups easier/simpler or to reduce disk fragmentation are positives in my mind (if in fact partitioning really helps with these things.)
Thanks, Jeanie
I was thinking that maybe having the "old drive" still bootable with Win98 might make the transition a little easier. I don't really want to make it the main documents drive as it's a quarter of the size of my new disk and that seems to defeat the purpose of getting the larger disk in the first place.
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