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[rjm]

Anyone know when creating multiple partitions on an NTFS drive using Windows' built in tool, are the partitions to the left or to the right (on the graphical box of the tool) the fastest?

I seem to recall partitions near the inside of a disc are fastest because of reduced seek time. But I don't know if left or right represents outside or inside in the Windows tool.

[InflatableMouse]

This only counts for mechanical disks, not SSD's. You can asume the partitions to the left are on the inside if they are created first. To be sure though, especially when you're redoing your work and recreating and deleting partitions, you can use a free/open source partitioning tool with a better graphical view, like GpartEd.

Also, if speed is important and you're willing to compromise some disk space, consider 64K allocation unit size.

If you're not into recklessly wasting space for a little more speed, you can still consider using larger allocation units but you'd have to be more considerate. 64K would suit volumes where you'd store files that are typically a few MB or larger in size. If you're storing large amounts of smaller files, try and pick an allocation size that averages around the file size, if possible.

Basically, if you pick 64K with too many small files, each file will take up 64K regardless of its own (smaller) size. With 30,000 files and wasting half of each allocation unit, you're wasting twice the space you would with 32K allocation units. Theoretically, it might be faster but that's not a good trade off IMO. But let's say its mostly videos and large music files on there, go with 64K units.

The reason is simply that the OS caches allocation tables. It's basically a database with records and pointers. If you have a large volume of 1TB with the default (4K) allocation unit size, I estimate you have around 200 million allocation units. With 64K allocation units that would be roughly 12,5 million units for the OS to keep track of. That's a lot less which can lead to a faster volume.

This practise is diminishing with faster pc's but I still believe its good practise and something to consider if speed is important. The OS still needs less memory with larger units and less CPU cycles to crawl through all the allocation units.

[glynor]

+1 to everything InflatableMouse said.

I probably wouldn't bother with the allocation unit sizing thing.  It has VERY diminishing returns, performance-wise, for desktop use.  It can matter a LOT for database servers and big file servers that handle multi-I/O from lots of clients at once.  In your average home-use server scenario, you aren't going to see much.

The only thing I wasn't sure of was the left/right thing.  The inside tracks being on the left makes the most sense to me, but I've never seen documentation showing that for sure (I've never looked either, though).

[InflatableMouse]

Now that I'm thinking about it, you shouldn't have to worry about the left partition being on the inside. If its the first partition you create, its automatically at the start of the drive. Windows won't deliberately create a partition at the end/outside of a disk.

So unless you start deleting/recreating partitions with other partitions still in place (ie, making a mess of things ), don't worry about it. Create the partition you want on the inside first, that's all.

[rjm]

Wow you guys are generous with your time. Great community here. Thanks!

Reason I asked is I am redeploying my old XP desktop as a poor man's server for backing up the media on my shiny new i5 desktop.

My old XP system has only 5 SATA and I'm not putting any more money into it so I had to make an ugly compromise and partition 1 3TB drive into system + 3 other media partitions. Don't really care how this system performs but thought I'd at least try to put the system partition in the sweet spot. Thanks to your advice I will ensure I create the system partition first.