New Harddrive Question

I am looking at getting a 500GB sata drive for christmas. My computer dosnt have sata ports but thats not the problem. My question is that will having a 500GB drive as a boot drive be much worse for a drive of that size than a smaller drive? I plan to partition it but I don't know if that makes a difference. Also whats the common partition size for windows xp pro?

I don't see why that should be bad in this day and age, especially since you're going to partition it.

The size for an XP partition entirely depends on your setup, your habits and so on. I personally wouldn't allocate less than 20 GB. At the same time I probably wouldn't make it larger than maybe 40-50 GB. So for me it would be 20-30 GB. But depending on your preferences you might want to make it 100 or more.

Well I feel secure that 30 will be fine. Espically considering that partition sizes can be changed later down the road unless I read that wrong on a few websites.

>>3
Well that's not such a good idea. Sure, it's possible but I wouldn't make a smaller partition with the plan of resizing it later in mind. Why not make it 50 GB if you aren't 100% sure that 30 will be enough? Saves you the hassle and the risk that come with resizing partitions.

If you absolutely want to be able to resize, then leave some unpartitioned space between your boot partition and the next one. At least that way you can resize it later without having to move too much data physically on the disc.

Does windows actually need so much space? I was under the impression that windows xp only actually used about 10 or 15 gbs. I am confused. Also what risk are there in resizing partitions?

>>1
You're making the 500GB SATA as the Master Boot (MB) for your OS but your motherboard doesn't support SATA? A PCI Card with SATA doesn't cut it (133MB/s) or make any sense for you to install it... Just letting you know...

This is my setup: 74GB SATA WD Drive and 250GB SATA WD Drive...



  

>>6
Whats a PCI card? I am going to use one of those cables that allows sata drives to use the ports that an IDE drive usually uses.

Many cheap PCI SATA controller cards and IDE-Sata adapters don't allow booting, especially on older systems that don't already have sata ports.

So then you're saying I wont be able to boot from the sata drive? That sucks.

On the other hand, if you get a SATA->USB adapter, it might allow you to boot. Depending if your BIOS supports that, of course.

As for >>5,
well no, it does not need THAT much space. However all the Windows updates and shit will cause it to grow considerably after a fresh installation. Also, even if you install programs on another partition, many put files in the Windows directory. The registry grows as well. And so on and so on. And you also need some buffer, in my experience you don't want a file system to be more full than ~70% for performance reasons, especially with an operating system on it.

The risks of resizing partitions... well, a lot of data usually gets moved around physically on the hard drive. In the case of a power outage or if the software simply screws up, you might have to deal with data loss or even with one or more corrupt partitions. That said, I have not encountered this problem yet, but I still try to avoid having to resize partitions. Even in the best case it takes a lot of time because the data has to be moved.

Maybe I will just move all the stuff I want to save over to the new sata drive and just reinstall windows on my old ide drive. I'll just partition my 180gb ide drive and give windows a generous 70gb spot.

>>1
Quarter stroke it and use the first partition for Operating system. Fast as fuck.

Quarter Stroke?

>>13
fap on it 4 times