Data Recovery Weekly

In the early days of computing, partitioning disk to several volumes was sometimes a good idea. Now, “one disk – one volume” is the most practical way to go. The original factors and reasoning behind having multiple partitions have much less significance now. The maximum available volume size, limited in FAT16 filesystem, is no longer a factor. Modern filesystems such as NTFS have much smaller clusters for a given volume size, so the loss of space to slack is much less a concern. There are few exceptions, When an extremely large RAID is involved, a single volume may be impractical because of the backup and the filesystem consistency checking considerations. Last but not least, the read-only data recovery requires a lot of free space same size as the damaged volume; this may be difficult to provide for a gigantic monolithic volume. If multiple operating systems are required with multiple different filesystems, then having several partitions is perfectly justified. The most common side...

I want to partition the RAID 0 array in order to create a dedicated space for Virtual Memory and Scratch disks for Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. The array is 4x 300GB WD VelociRaptor RAID0. This is not going to work as intended. To get a better overall performance, he'd be better off splitting the array to two 2x drives each, or maybe even down to standalone drives. Scratch and swap files produce better performance when placed on separate hard drives in such a way that no "spindle" is servicing more than one data stream. In the layout with one 4-disk array, four "spindles" would be serving three or four data streams (source data, swap, scratch, and output data), which is far from ideal because the number of seeks would be too high. Adding partitions to the mix would only ensure there is a certain minimum distance for the disk heads to travel across the partition boundaries. This would actually decrease the performance. In RAID planning, speed estimations, such...