Large Hard Drive Partition Question

[Tempest 2084]

I have a 4GB hard drive that's currently partitioned into two 2GB partitions. Is there any reason I can't just make one large 4GB partition? I think I heard somewhere that it eats up RAM, but how much? I have 2MB of chip ram and 16MB of fast ram (I could also get another 8MB of ram if need be, but it would be Zorro II ram).

[idrougge]

If anything, it eats less RAM.

[Tempest 2084]

So a larger single partition would use less ram?

[Jope]

Some tens of kilobytes less. :-)

The partition size depends a bit on the filesystem you have chosen. If you're running FFS, you should keep the partitions relatively small. The biggest reason is the disk-validator. Larger partitions take longer to validate and more importantly, the validation process eats a lot of RAM when you have multi-gig partition. Potentially more RAM is required than is installed in your computer.

PFS3/SFS don't need the validation process, so partition size is not such a big concern.

[thomas]

16 MB RAM is sufficient for everything. As a rule of thumb FFS needs as many megabytes of RAM to validate as the partition's size is in gigabytes.

[Jope]

Good to know. I ran out once on an A500+A590 combo, but I never found out how much I should have had. :-)

[Kin Hell]

But large Partitions are harder to maintain & will slow up your overall system performance, especially if it is an IDE drive. SCSI is more forgiving because of no CPU loading & DMA access.

100Mb as a boot partition is plenty big enough for OS3.9 & a 50Mb boot partition is considered overkill for OS3.1....

So, 4Mb of Fastram still leaves 12Mb Fast & 3 or 4 Partitions across a 4GB HD is not going to deplete an amount of Ram that will leave your Miggy useless.

100Mb - Boot Partition
200Mb - Work Partition - Apps/Utils
2.5GB - Games Partition
1.0GB - Back-up Partiton

Easy to maintain partitions, quicker to back up & less to loose if your Hard drive bitmap ever got seriously screwed up.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Kin Hell

Easy to maintain partitions, quicker to back up & less to loose if your Hard drive bitmap ever got seriously screwed up.

Indeed.

[Tempest 2084]

let me give some more details. I have an A3000, and I plan on putting either OS 3.9 or ClassicWB on it depending on which I like better. I'm using my Amiga mostly for WHDLoad so I wanted all my games on one large partition so the launcher program could find them easier. Since my HD is only 4GB I was going to stay with the original FFS but if it has that validation issue I can try one of the others (which is better for my situation?).

[daxb]

If you only want to play WHDLoad games then a boot partition (about 100MB but depends on what the OS install needs) and a games partition is enough. For data or other programms another partition is recommendable.

If you really only want WHDLoad then you don`t need a complete OS install. Do this only when you know what are you doing.

PFS or SFS as filesystem is a good choice. Both will work.

[idrougge]

I (and most Amigas) always keep the system on a separate, small, System partition.

For reasons of security, I add another system partition of the same size to which I regularly backup my main system partition. That way, it is always possible to restore your system quickly if something happens.

[Tempest 2084]

So maybe a small 250MB system partition, a 250MB backup partition, and 3.5GB games partition then?

Does OS 3.9 or ClassicWB come with the updated file systems or do I have to install those manually? Can you update the filesystem on a partition with data on it or will it reformat the drive?

[idrougge]

You can't change the file system to an alien one without reformating the drive. Changing between versions of the same file system might work.

[Tempest 2084]

Originally Posted by idrougge

You can't change the file system to an alien one without reformating the drive. Changing between versions of the same file system might work.

Ah. That's what I was afraid of. Well I'll try FFS for now and if that causes issues then I'll make a little OS partition and a large game partition and change the file system on it.

[idrougge]

Just go ahead and throw in PFS3.

[Tempest 2084]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Just go ahead and throw in PFS3.

I think I'll try that next time. I've already got the 4GB partition and I transferred the system.zip file over for ClassicWB (which took 3 hours by serial). If I start having issues I'll start from scratch with PFS3.