Are 9 Partitions on a 500 GB HDD too many? [closed]

Question

I have 9 partitions on a 500 GB SATA 7200 RPM HDD. I did this few years back to keep things in order. I was also not sure if individual folders instead of Partition would hold 40 GB Up to 100 GB or more data.

I am reformatting & Installing Win-7 ( 64 bit ) on this drive & would like to know if too many partitions would affect the performance or slow the pc down & should I reduce the number of partitions.

System is a Dell workstation T-7500 with following specs.

Processor : Intel Xeon E5645 @ 2.4 GHz

RAM : 12 GB

OS : Win -7 Ultimate ( 64bit )

What would you guys suggest ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Too many partitions should not slow the computer down (other than the very minor variance in disk access times noted above), but you don't need the partitions for the reason you stated, so there's no harm in using a single partition instead.

Folders are just logical ideas in modern disk file systems like NTFS (they don't 'really' exist - but that's a whole other conversation), so there are no restrictions on how much an individual folder can hold. The main size restrictions on most file systems are how big a partition can be, how big an individual file can be, and sometimes how many characters you can have in a path. On Windows 7's NTFS, both of these limits are huge - 256 TiB (262144 GB) for a partition, and 16 TiB (16384 GB) for a file. [source]

Answer 2

As I experienced: In Windows, if you have too many partitions in the same HDD that the OS is installed on, then this will slow down your system, because of some OS functions that work on the background like indexing and the paging file systems, Which cannot be disabled completely as of these functions are built within the system cycle. So, if you want to have more than 3 partitions, I suggest you use 2 HDD, one for the OS itself(with one primary partition) and the other one is for your files (with as much partitions as you want). This way, the other HDD will be recognized as a secondary drive, which will make the system use its own functions on the primary drive only. (You can do a test to verify that)

Answer 3

Hard disks can be split into four primary partitions, or one of these can be configured as an extended partition.

In terms of any issues, you will have performance issues, given with this example; it should give you some understanding

A HDD has the highest transfer rates and the fastest access times on the outer edge. So if you have a HDD with 100GB and create 10 partitions then the first 10GB is the fastest partition, the last 10GB the slowest.

So, if you’re looking to create partitions for organisational reasons then you could always have all your programs on the same partition then any media files like movies or such can be placed separately so you don’t conflict with anything.