Disk Sizing - Part I
With today's "monster sized" hard disks, this article looks at ways of setting up your hard drive(s) for optimum usage. It will look at:
· Disk sizing in general
· Disk partitioning
· Suggestions when adding a 2nd hard disk
There are a lot of choices to be made, and it does depend upon how you want to use your system.
Disk Sizing
Disk sizing is quite a science in its own right. Companies have to carry our complex calculations in order to ensure that they have enough disk space to meet their business needs now and a short time into the future.
For us individuals, there is not the "heavy math" to undergo, but we CAN think about what and how we use our systems now and in the future.
Of course, a lot of the disk sizing is dependent on what we use our machines for. Is it purely a games machine or for the "home office". Are we planning on getting our computers to do some function they don't carry out at present? (such as storing pictures of the whole family album). Maybe you are starting up in business and your computer will be used for not just letters and spreadsheets, but you want to design flyers and advertisements, store presentations - the list can be endless.
How do we start?
To start, we need to see how much disk space we have use, how much we have left and whether we are likely (in the near future), to want to store a lot more data (files) on our computers. It is a proven fact that:
The more data we have, the less space and therefore poorer performance can be expected
Poor performance will (usually) get to a gradual stage where our machines cease to work in anything like an acceptable manner. Don't clear up your house and gradually it gets in to such a mess that you can't live there any more. So it can be with computers.
How do you size?
How do we know we have or will have enough disk space for our needs? There are complex calculations, which are outside the range of this article, but there are simpler ways we can check.
Check the percentage of disk free space using "My Computer" and the pie chart that says how much is free. Whilst there, check the size of your hard disk (measured in giga or megabytes. 1024 megabytes equals 1 gigabyte)
What you want to achieve is a balance between space (and future growth), ease of organising your data / system and enough space for the system to have for its own use (the swap file, temporary file storage for both local and Internet files).
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