Does creating more partitions reduces hard drive performance

[Edvard]

I am a bit confused here. I have a 500GB drive. I had created around 3 partition in which one is dedicated for Windows. I kept that as 100GB and others are divided into two parts of 200GB each. I keep my movies and data inside that. But to dual boot, I shrinking the first partition and removed some 40GB from that. I had kept 20GB as the Linux partition where I am going to install Linux Mint Mate and the other 20GB will be allotted as swap space for good performance. But when I did the same, my drive looks perform slow. Is that due to the swap or Linux partition. I am planing to extract more space from other two partition. I think my drive is getting slower.

[Author]

It actually depends on the drive model. If this is a old hard drive then it will become slower. New drives works better in the same case. Defrag your hard drive to optimize the performance.

[Genesee]

If the drive is becoming slower then you must keep a close watch. Because there can be some hardware failure in future. There are number of software which can tuneup your device. Among them is UBCD. This is a bootable drive that comes with a Hard drive scanner. Run the scan, and it will test out any drive failure or error. If the drive condition is too poor then you have to get a replacement as early as you can. The performance somehow degrades due to poor operating system or hardware limitation.

I had recently lost my 1TB Seagate drive which is being sent to replacement. The drive crashed instantly. Anyhow I am going to get the drive back, but I lost all my data. It is recommended that you must keep the minimum partition needed. The higher you increase the slower system will became. It is not complicated to manage your data. You have to keep backup of important files only. So that in future if you lost something atleast you can recover the important files.

[Yesenia]

What type of drive you are using. I hope there is better product. I always keep a secondary drive in my system and put my important data in the same. There is no guarantee when your drive can crash.

[Brooks]

Sometime it depends on the amount of data you have. For example if your drive partition is fulled of big file size then operating system takes time to load up. It reads the data and then same is then displayed. If you feel that your system is becoming slower then you must do one thing. First do not dual boot the system. Second re-install fresh windows to check that there is effect in the performance or not.

There can be some service in the back-end which might be consuming your system resource because of which you are finding the system slow. It is not necessary that system works slow due to poor hard drive. You must check what all services are working in the back-end. Try to scan your drive with hijack this. This will keep the track of every service working the back-end.

[cHYNA]

I do not think that would make difference. One thing I agree that as time goes on the drive became slower. The more older it became the slower it will work. Choose good storage brand at the time of purchase.

[The EClipse]

Did you checked your system properly. I will too recommend you to test your drive with some kind of scanner software. There are many drive scanner that available on the web. You can download and scan the same. If you find any error do not forge to keep a regular backup. Because if something happened all will be crashed. I keep a lot of movies in my system. And now the drive opens up too slowly.

But the same when I open in Linux bootable usb, it works like charm. So to some extent this issue is not related to your hard drive but to the operating system. Disk defragmentation is one of the right option to ensure that your drive would perform well. Other than this there are many hard drive optimization software to fix various issue.

[Qiao]

Those tools might not give great effect. If your drive is slow then it will become much slower and surely crash one day. Show your system to some system technician to get the right suggestion.

[Dexter85]

The drive works slow, it is not crashed or dead. So there is no option you can ask for replacement right now. Anyhow I keep two partition in my system. Once is for Windows and other one is for Linux. Data are thus evenly stored in each other. So it is not complicated for me to configure the operating system properly. Also it much easier to manage. What thing you have to take care, that when you operating on such thing there should be a space where you can keep backup.

I did this once a year before and till now my system is working quiet nicely.