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Primary Partition

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by edmond_sng

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Hi,

I was reading Windows2000 Server installation Guide by Dell. They recommend that we should create 2 partitions on the physical disk. Primary partition of 4095Mb and partition the rest of the disk space for data or application. In the past,I usually create one partition when installing Windows2000 Server. The reason being is to avoid having C-drive running out of space at later stage. Could somebody tell me what are the advantages of having 2 partitions as oppose to just one?

Look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,
Edmond

5 replies

by alpha-male

The primary advantages I can see are:

1) the majority of your writing and erasing data will be on the large data partition, not on your OS partition. This will keep the OS partition much less fragmented and thus running better.

2) Should your OS become corrupted, damaged or perhaps (depending) virused, your data is on a different partition and may be saveable.

3) Larger partitions tend to be more wasteful of drive space. Depending on the size of your drive I may even use more partitions...

4) Since this is a server, having your OS on a different partition is a good practice for security. You can severly limit and restrict access to your servers while having the "data-share" as open as you like. Using several partitions can assist with this too (organizationally). You can even set up a swap drive.

I think Dell is figuring 4 gb of OS drive is a LOT of space. Since you won't be putting data and apps on that drive it would take a lot to fill it. I'm not saying you can't...just that it would probably require being wasteful or careless.

Hope this helps some!

by brian

The small size is not as big an issue as it initially seems. I recently purchased a dell server and was surprised by this as well.

However you can "create" more space on the c: drive by adding mount points (folders) to the drive that actually store the data on the other drive.

You can also use mounted drives when you need additional storage space on a volume. If you map a folder on that volume to another volume with available disk space (for example, two gigabytes), you extend the storage space of the volume by two gigabytes (GB). With mounted drives, you are not limited by the size of the volume in which the folder is created. See the following Microsoft KB article Q314449 for more info...

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