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Will a Bootcamp Partition slow my MBP?

I

iamjohnsname

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 10, 2011
22
0
Hi all,

I have been told that giving a drive two partitions slows it down, no matter what.

As a video editor, I desperately need the disc speed.

Luckily, I have an OWC 240GB SATA3 6Gbps SSD.

But if I put a Win7 Bootcamp partition on 60GB of that disc, am I compromising some of the speed gained?

My alternative would be to place the stock SSD in the optical bay and put Bootcamp on it instead.

Ultimately, will creating a second partition on the SSD slow its speed?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

-- John
 
I was going to say that partitions and hard drives don't impact speed performance, but you mentioned your MBP has an SSD. I don't have much experience with that but I do know that some friends of mine (with windows machines mind you) used partitioning to increase the performance of their SSD's.

If you want to give this article a look through this is how my friends found the optimal size of the partition that enhanced their disk speed. Hopefully this may lead to to your answer for the Mac side of things.
 
It shouldn't slow it down. I have a the 750gb 5400 hdd with bootcamp partition and it's just as fast without it. Also, a major factor in speed is how well you maintain your drives.
 
weemanpow3 said:
It shouldn't slow it down. I have a the 750gb 5400 hdd with bootcamp partition and it's just as fast without it. Also, a major factor in speed is how well you maintain your drives.
Click to expand...

I have this same HDD and when I put Win 7 Pro on it (160gb) my system slowed down. On the Windows side it's blazing fast, but my Mac side i notice a lose in speed. Maybe it's not because of that but when I partitioned it got slow.
 
It is no problem at all unless you miss the space.
The reason why some might say 2 partitions slows a system down is because on an HDD only the beginning of a drive is quick. Than it gets slower and slower and a 2.5" drive usually ends up about half the maximum speed at the end of the drive.
If you make 2 Partitions of the same size. You cut it in half. The first partition will be the fast half the second the slow. Whatever runs off the first won't be any slower as than with only one partition also you are bound to end up at the slow part if your HDD runs full.
Say you have one partition install your OS. Move all your music and movies and stuff on the HDD from a backup until it is say 75% full. Now you start installing all the applications (like Photoshop) on the slowest 25% of the drive *. The only cure are some defrag programs that allocate files as their nature and usage pattern requires. They don't just defrag, they move files to where they need to be like Music and Movies to the end of the drive. There is no software I know of for OSX. Most people never realize this problem they just think it normal a system slows down when it gets full.
That much to Harddisk theory.

A SSD is equally fast in every sector/page/whateveryoucallit. There is no slow down at the end of a drive. You can cut it in as many pieces as you want. The only problem is running out of space all the time is really annoying, my 60 GB win partition has this problems. If you intend to use it for games too, make it a bit bigger like 80-90 GB. Those modern games are huge (10-15GB each) but stuff loads so nice and fast if they are on the SSD. I prefer the hassle with running out of space, and removing old games if I want to play something else, to those poor HDD loading speeds.

*really dumb thing to do obviously, you'd want to do that sooner before you move all the crap useless junk onto the drive or even on a HDD you want to set aside a 1st fast partition for OS and Applications and whatever needs speed.
This is one reason many more tech savy Windows Users use 2 partitions. The other reason is a seperate OS/App partition can be deleted entirely and setup new without ever having to touch the data partition. Quicker if you need to reinstall and you back in the days you could also only defrag the OS partition and don't waste time on the data partition.
 
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it shouldnt affect performance at all, assuming that you keep at least 10% of ur osx partition free for swap. All you're doing is reserving x amount of your hd for windows.

Would saving 100 gb of music on your computer make it slow down? No. This is pretty much no different.
 
AFPoster said:
I have this same HDD and when I put Win 7 Pro on it (160gb) my system slowed down. On the Windows side it's blazing fast, but my Mac side i notice a lose in speed. Maybe it's not because of that but when I partitioned it got slow.
Click to expand...

Probably because OS X indexes every new drive/partition it recognizes. It should run fine once done.
 
Partioning an SSD can slightly lower scores in synthetic benchmarks. In real life however you will not notice any difference.
 
Here's the reason I felt the need to ask:

Taken from this website: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/427772

"Storage Rules for an Editing Rig. Some Basics"

Rule 1: NEVER partition a disk. You may ask why? First of all, it does not increase disk space, it just allocates the space differently. However, the major drawback is that for a partitioned disk the OS must first access a partition table at the beginning of the disk for all accesses to the disk, thus requiring the heads to move to the beginning of the disk, then when it has gotten the partition info move to the designated area on the disk and perform the requested action. This means much more wear-and-tear on the mechanics of the disk, slower speeds and more overhead for the OS, all reducing efficiency.

It's written by a guy whose advice has always been reliable, so I thought I should follow it in this case too. But it specifically says at the start that "SSDs are left out" of this discussion.

But it sounds like people have differing opinions on this for SSDs.
 
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