QueKara Posted February 23, 2011 Report Share Posted February 23, 2011 Hello all! I have decided to join the beautiful world of PC gaming, and am building my first gaming rig as I type this. I have a quick question about the OS though. Many people put Windows 7 on its own separate partition and keep programs, documents, etc. on a separate one. I believe I have heard the reasoning is that it prevents Windows from slowing down as you fill up the HDD. I bought a 1TB hard drive today. Is their an ideal partition size I should give to W7, and keep everything else on a large partition? Cheers, QueKara Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted February 23, 2011 Report Share Posted February 23, 2011 Well I have 2 1TB drives, I have Win7 and most of my programs on one drive, with User Documents stored there too (kind of fiddly to move em from drive to drive). That's then split in two with the rest taken up by Steam, which works wonders when on it's own as it means you can re-install the OS and not have to redownload stuff. I've recently expanded the Steam partition giving me shy of 700GB on the Win7 side and 250GB for Steam. I have 82 games on Steam. Some small, some big. But should give you an idea depending on how many you think you'll get. Then my other drive is split in two. One with media (music, video, photos) then the other with back ups of uni work, important files, save files. And installers for printers, uni software, OS etc. It's kind of a personal thing. I'd recommend giving Steam it's own drive unless you're looking forward to re-downloading it should Windows go tits up. I've never been keen on splitting the User Documents off from the OS partition, goes funky with most software. And there's no point making a back-up partition if it's on the same drive. Drive breaks you lose the origna and the back up edit: oh yeah, regarding steam, if you want it on it's own partition you need to make sure when installing Steam you make sure it installs on that partition. All the games you get on steam go in the steam/steamapps folder. Not like most games in the Program Files folder. Though if you leave it to the default they'll go in C/:Program Files/Steam/SteamApps. You'd want D/:Steam/Steamapps Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Faiblesse Des Sens Posted February 23, 2011 Report Share Posted February 23, 2011 I don't know how other people do it but I have games and Win7 on about 120gbs and the rest for data. Basically, games and OS on one partition, everything else on another. Though maybe people install games on another partition? Hell, do you even get the choice in steam? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MasterDex Posted February 23, 2011 Report Share Posted February 23, 2011 A 50gb partition dedicated to your OS should do fine as long as you keep anything you can install elsewhere off the partition. Moving up from XP to Windows 7, I set the partition at 30gb as it was plenty for XP but found 7 quickly used up that space. The partition can be as large as you want but I wouldn't recommend dropping below 50gb. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
staySICK Posted February 23, 2011 Report Share Posted February 23, 2011 I have a 40 gb ssd all dedicated to my os. currently it has about 10 gigs free, and some of that is because of a few programs I felt should be installed on the OS' drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted February 23, 2011 Report Share Posted February 23, 2011 I have 100 GB for my OS and most programs, 320 GB for my games (same physical drive, different partition), then various other hard drives for various other stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.