quote:
Originally posted by rav0
You dad is certainly correct, multiple partitions can be engineered to boost PC performance, but if you know what you're doing 
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Though it is not because you make multiple (and thus smaller) partitions that your PC will run "faster"...
Aka: it is not the act and result of making partitions that will (slightly!) boost Windows performance. It is the manner in how you use the partitions that's important. Just dividing your 200GB big harddrive into some partitions will not make Windows run any faster at all.
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The reason behind partitionating is so indexing tools, backup tools, etc will need less time to perform their task (on 1 partition)... They will still take the same amount of time when you do a full backup of all partitions of course. Though, such tasks are executed so seldom that performance increase is neglectable, and even then the performance increase would be small compared to everyday use.
The reason that some people might tell you:
"because then you can have the windows swapfile on a different partition and thus will make Windows run faster" is mostly BS also. This would only be true when those "partitions" are actually physically different drives, so both the harddisks can work at the same time. When you simply have 1 physical HD, there are only 1 set of HD's heads which can only do 1 thing at a time, partitions or not.
The only valid reason (IMO) to give is because of the file system fragmenting problem. When you divide a HD into several partitions (and you use those partitions of course) fragmenting on 1 specific partition will be relativly less compared to the whole drive when you didn't partitionate. Fragmenting can cause Windows performance decrease big enough to notice, hence why you should regulary defragment your HD (or partition).
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