How to slice a 2TB drive?

(PeteCresswell) wrote:

Assuming that you did that without having to re-install the OS,
what utility did you use?


I suggest have a look at Acronis disk Director

http://tinyurl.com/5u8b6oo

Or try this preview link for your confidence of the very long link:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/5u8b6oo


hth

All I want to do is break the disk into 6 or so equal parts. The main
reason is to give each part its own drive letter and disk label. This
makes the FAT 6 times smaller so it only has to read 1/6 of the info
during access times. I also think this makes defragging easier, but
since XP doesn't always let me defrag without booting, I don't defrag
much.....well never.

Why use FAT? XP work best and I thought only in NTSF?

I didn't notice the FAT word. But FAT is faster (becasue it's simple)
though it might have fragmentation.


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On Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:48:55 +0800, Man-wai Chang
wrote:

All I want to do is break the disk into 6 or so equal parts. The main
reason is to give each part its own drive letter and disk label. This
makes the FAT 6 times smaller so it only has to read 1/6 of the info
during access times. I also think this makes defragging easier, but
since XP doesn't always let me defrag without booting, I don't defrag
much.....well never.

Why use FAT? XP work best and I thought only in NTSF?

I didn't notice the FAT word. But FAT is faster (becasue it's simple)
though it might have fragmentation.

I was not clear. If you slice the drive into 6 parts then the drive
is only searching through a File Allocation Table (not FAT32) for 1/6
of the information. I would be formatting NTSF, but I am still
unsure how to slice it. Saving some for later seems like a pretty
good idea.

I am still unsure what happens I only use 1/4 of the drive with only
an extended partition. Without a disk utility, can I add more of the
unallocated space and "end up" with only 4 drive letters? A one time
copy from one partition to another is not unreasonable when I get to
the point of needing more space.

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per Paul:
As an example of this, I have somewhere around a 320GB disk in
my new laptop. I shrank the C: partition on it, down to 30GB
(with a plan perhaps, in the near future,

Assuming that you did that without having to re-install the OS,
what utility did you use?

I used the "shrink" option in Windows 7 Disk Management, which on
its own has the ability to shrink a partition by 50%. To get a
partition smaller than that, I used an evaluation copy of Raxco
PerfectDisk, for its ability to move metadata files in the NTFS
partition, "to the left". By combining the two tools, I was
able to shrink the C: partition to the desired size. Since the
operation was a one time thing, I threw away the eval when I was
finished.

On my WinXP machine, when I was doing stuff like this, I defragmented
the target partitions first, so as much of the data was "to the left"
as was possible. Then, I used Partition Magic for the changes.

I have some things installed, which are just too complicated to meddle
with. For example, I have nothing here I can rely on, for dealing with
UFS file systems. I prefer situations, where I have more than one OS,
that can work on a file system, so if there is an issue with the
file system being "busy", I can come up with a way of working around it.
I was surprised, when the "all purpose toolbox" Linux, wouldn't go
near a UFS, leaving me high and dry. (I think Solaris and FreeBSD can
use UFS. They generally end up living on their own disks.)

Paul

On Sat, 12 Mar 2011 14:06:11 -0500, Metspitzer
wrote:

On Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:48:55 +0800, Man-wai Chang
wrote:

All I want to do is break the disk into 6 or so equal parts. The main
reason is to give each part its own drive letter and disk label. This
makes the FAT 6 times smaller so it only has to read 1/6 of the info
during access times. I also think this makes defragging easier, but
since XP doesn't always let me defrag without booting, I don't defrag
much.....well never.

Why use FAT? XP work best and I thought only in NTSF?

I didn't notice the FAT word. But FAT is faster (becasue it's simple)
though it might have fragmentation.

I was not clear. If you slice the drive into 6 parts then the drive
is only searching through a File Allocation Table (not FAT32) for 1/6
of the information. I would be formatting NTSF, but I am still
unsure how to slice it. Saving some for later seems like a pretty
good idea.

I am still unsure what happens I only use 1/4 of the drive with only
an extended partition. Without a disk utility, can I add more of the
unallocated space and "end up" with only 4 drive letters? A one time
copy from one partition to another is not unreasonable when I get to
the point of needing more space.

I guess a lot depends how you "use" the disk. I have a 1 TB disk that
is now holding all my data files. It's broken up into 8 logical disks
(Now, has been less in the past), with sizes ranging from 244 GB down
to 65 GB. In the past when I had a smaller disk for my data files, I
often found myself running out of space in one partition, with still
lots of space in some other partition. I thought about going to a
dynamic disk setup, but my OS won't support that, so I'd end up
copying data off to another small disk, then shrinking a partition,
moving data around, and increasing the size of the partition that i
needed larger. A real PITA, even though I used Batch files and
Robocopy to do the copying. With the 1 TB I was able to "oversize"
every partition, so hopefully I won't go through that again anytime
soon.

I've automated backups to a set of batch files that run at midnight
using Robocopy to copy anything "new" from the data partition(s) to
another hard disk.... using both an internal and a separate external
disk to hold the backups. (I've tried backup software, but prefer to
have backups taht I can easily read, not some encrypted files.)

I personally don't think that leaving a lot of space unoccupied is a
very good idea, unless you forsee the need to add another partition in
the future. That would be the case if you would want to add another
separate category to the filing system. So if you have all your
categories set, and it's 7, I'd go ahead and set up 7 partitions now
and be done with it.

On Mar 12, 3:28 am, Metspitzer wrote:
On Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:46:11 -0500, Metspitzer
wrote:

I am reading this:
http://partition.radified.com/
Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off
on this.

After listening to the suggestions, can you do this with XP?
Say I create an extended partition (no primary) that is 1/4 space on
the drive and leave 3/4 unformatted (unallocated?), and make that 4
logical drives. Say I have a very good reason for having 4 different
type files. All I expect to happen is that when I run out of space is
that I just want all 4 drives to double in space.

What happens when I want to use another 1/4 of the space and I don't
really want 8 logical drives? I want 4 drives twice as large.

This make sense to anyone?

Yes. In fat32 it means you'll be up all night. In the morning you
have a 1.5T drive for 375Meg you allocated for 4 drive letters in an
extended partition. All day you copy data to them. But, it's getting
late and entropy and endless data happens, keeps on streaming, you
change your mind and now want to allocate another 375M equally for
each 94Meg drive letter, which effectively will yield four each at
188Meg drives. Starting with the last physically placed drive
(remember, lettering is arbitrary in XP), that last drive is to be
enlarged and moved farthest away from the next-to-last 94Meg drive.
Upon completion and becoming a 188Meg drive, the next-to-last 94meg
becomes the last drive, and the procedure is repeated until all four
drives are enlarged.

It can be a cumbersome process according to the software, (sizes, data
type, and file systems), as well, during the "enlargement" -- the data
formerly occupying less space is dispersed over a greater space in
"wider" distances between the drive sector and cluster assignments.
This requires disk fragment consolidation, where that same data is
"squeezed" back into a contingent whole.

All of which, we now have established to know, the moving and
expanding of drive, as well subsequently consolidating data, is time
consuming. Therefore, you're going to be up all night, no longer a
simple computer operator, but squeezing boxes like an accordion player.

On Sun, 13 Mar 2011 14:13:49 -0700 (PDT), Flasherly
wrote:

On Mar 12, 3:28 am, Metspitzer wrote:
On Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:46:11 -0500, Metspitzer
wrote:

I am reading this:
http://partition.radified.com/
Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off
on this.

After listening to the suggestions, can you do this with XP?
Say I create an extended partition (no primary) that is 1/4 space on
the drive and leave 3/4 unformatted (unallocated?), and make that 4
logical drives. Say I have a very good reason for having 4 different
type files. All I expect to happen is that when I run out of space is
that I just want all 4 drives to double in space.

What happens when I want to use another 1/4 of the space and I don't
really want 8 logical drives? I want 4 drives twice as large.

This make sense to anyone?

Yes. In fat32 it means you'll be up all night. In the morning you
have a 1.5T drive for 375Meg you allocated for 4 drive letters in an
extended partition. All day you copy data to them. But, it's getting
late and entropy and endless data happens, keeps on streaming, you
change your mind and now want to allocate another 375M equally for
each 94Meg drive letter, which effectively will yield four each at
188Meg drives. Starting with the last physically placed drive
(remember, lettering is arbitrary in XP), that last drive is to be
enlarged and moved farthest away from the next-to-last 94Meg drive.
Upon completion and becoming a 188Meg drive, the next-to-last 94meg
becomes the last drive, and the procedure is repeated until all four
drives are enlarged.

It can be a cumbersome process according to the software, (sizes, data
type, and file systems), as well, during the "enlargement" -- the data
formerly occupying less space is dispersed over a greater space in
"wider" distances between the drive sector and cluster assignments.
This requires disk fragment consolidation, where that same data is
"squeezed" back into a contingent whole.

All of which, we now have established to know, the moving and
expanding of drive, as well subsequently consolidating data, is time
consuming. Therefore, you're going to be up all night, no longer a
simple computer operator, but squeezing boxes like an accordion player.

No one said FAT32. I have files that are larger then 4G. I was
talking about the File Allocation Table. I plan to use NTFS.

Among the many things I don't know about disk drives, my main question
I have now is....how do drive letters work if you only allocate a 1/4
of the drive at a time?

If I make 4 drive letters now and then allocate another 1/4 of the
drive, can I make the current 4 drives twice as large or do I just add
another drive letter?

You'll get more authoritative and experienced replies in
comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage . That's the hard
drive newsgroup. As I understand it, your questions is
basically whether you can put just an Extended partition
on an external USB hard drive and use unallocated space
in the future to expand the logical drives within that Extended
partition. Keep your questions precise, and include the
name of the operating system and its edition level.

*TimDaniels*

On Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:21:15 -0700, "Timothy Daniels"
wrote:

You'll get more authoritative and experienced replies in
comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage . That's the hard
drive newsgroup. As I understand it, your questions is
basically whether you can put just an Extended partition
on an external USB hard drive and use unallocated space
in the future to expand the logical drives within that Extended
partition. Keep your questions precise, and include the
name of the operating system and its edition level.

*TimDaniels*

Got it going. I made 3-320 primary partitions and one extended which
I split into 3 more drives.

Thanks everyone