Best partitioning practices?

I am about to reformat my wife's Dell. I don't remember the sizes of the HDDs but it has one 80 GB drive which I usually split into a C drive for Windows, and then one or two smaller partitions for my wife to store her Powerpoints and Money files in. The second drive is larger, I think around 160 GB or something like that, and I tend to split it into several partitions; one for music/media files, one for video/acid files, one for documents, one for porn... you get the idea.

Ever since the previous install, XP on that comp has been tremendously sluggish, even though there isn't that much installed on it. The system specs are old of course but the speed at which it accesses data is slow.

I am wondering if my partitioning scheme is causing extra delay in retrieving data. What would be a more ideal way to partition a semi-large IDE drive? One or two huge chunks, or several small ones?

Any recommendations would be most welcome.

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Several smaller ones would be faster. When you go to access a file in the smaller ones there is less space the file can be located in and that will result in faster call times.

I have the exact same scheme set up on mine. Windows is on an 80G drive partitioned into 15G and 65G (roughly). I have windows installed on the 15G, I use the 65G for program files for all the software installed. My 2nd drive is a 300G drive broken into 50G partitions for music, files, etc.

*Edit - How often do you defrag the drives?

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Personally I wouldn't partition it at all, as if you need more space for MP3s (for example) it's going to be a pain to re-size the partitions to adjust the space allocation. I'd create folders on your 2nd drive for things like "movies", "photos" etc... If you really wanted, you could make them appear as drive letters by using the subst command (http://lifehacker.com/software/windo...ter-267728.php)

To speed up things a little more, if you have Windows installed on drive 1 then make sure your virtual memory cache is stored on drive 2

Thanks for the excellent suggestions, both of you.

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