How would you partition an 500gb hd? i was thinking 100gb for os,games,other,programs, 200gb for storeing movies,video, another 200gb for music storage.

I heard if u run your oc on 8gb partition you get boost? is this true.

35 to 40GB should be enough for OS/programs. Given that video files are considerably larger than music files, I'd give more space for video but really depends on how much space you need for each. If you get a program like Partition Magic you can change the size of partitions any time. definitely one of the most useful features of the program

well... the best way to run a large hdd is as a single backup hdd, partitioning then is only going to help with organizing data.

regarding performance and the hdd, particularly with ocing... anytime you oc, you run the risk of data corruption. it doesnt happen very often, but it does happen. that aside though, partitioning for the sole benefit of practical performance, just isnt worth it for most things. however, if you plan on only using the fastest outside portion of your hdd for applications and such, you may experience a slight improvement in os responsiveness, about in line with what raid 0 would offer for most things. the very fastest portion may only be the first 12% of your hdd (60GB), but generally, the fastest overall area of a hdd will be within the first 70% (350GB). and after that its only going to feel a little slower.

again, STRs are the primary reason for that, before 70% you may get as high as 80MB/s or so, especially near the beginning, where it may even be a consistant 80MB/s or so. after 70% however you may be as low as around 35MB/s or so, even consistantly, especially in the last few %. but, over the whole span of the hdd, there isnt a whole lot of difference you can tell in practical uses usually. access times (and the vast majority of mainly smaller files) are the primary reason for that though, even though the STRs may vary widely, the access times stay pretty consistant, leading to relatively consistant performance throughout, either fast or slow, for many things you might do (its a major reason defragging helps after awhile, so the locating of needed files doesnt take nearly as long, essentially helping to keep seek times lower, consequently keeping hdd performance higher). diskeeper is a good program to use, certainly better than the standard windows defrag.

if you want to see for certain where the fastest area of your hdd is, download hdtune, and then bench, itll then map out the performance of your drive for both strs and access times on a graph.

so i should keep as 500gb without partition ur sayin .

well, i wouldnt partition it just for the sake of performance. partitioning will help to keep data more organized though, and will take less time to defrag if you choose to, because the partitions are smaller. but beyond just organizing, theres not much reason to partition the hdd.

edit: rethinking what i had first said though up above, partitioning may actually be a good idea, simply because the partitioning will help prevent a lot of needless fragmentation over the whole hdd. Because the files are more organized, the fragmentation will be kept inside a relatively small area, making the files able to be located that much faster even after fragmentation.

sorry about that. yeah, on second thought, i would say to just partition the hdd how you want.

well it depends on YOUR data... surely you dont have 200gb of music? a 5-10 gb would be fine for that.. or you could just do what i have, all my data on one HDD and my OS & games on another