Does a partitioned hard drive reduce performance?

Simply put in the title, I have a 5400 rpm hard drive and would like to know if a partitioned it (roughly in half) would it reduce the performance of the drive as a whole.

Also, would my hard drive be any type of bottleneck in my system.

 

Actually it would improve performance, latency to be exact. On the other hand, if you use the second partition, and say, try copying files from one partition to the other, performance there would be pretty dismal. Any time you access different partitions at the same time you'd have a large performance hit.

Even leaving the second partition mounted would hurt performance, thanks to indexing and such.

 

Hard disks get slower towards the centre and partitioning is one way to put least used material into the area with lowest transfer rates. Alternatively, it means that the operating system files will always stay in the part of the disc with good transfer rates.

I have partitioned my HDDs for years - a left over from the limitations of FAT - but it means I can manage the allocation of space.

I'm not convinced that indexing will increase with more partitions - there will be the same number of files to index whether in one partition or many. But it is correct to note that moving a file between partitions will be much slower because the file has to be moved instead of just changing the entry in the allocation table.

Another factor in favour of partitioning is that you can then put all your own files somewhere separate to the operating system. The Windows restore discs or images provided by many manufacturers just wipe C: and re-write the factory installation. If your files are on C: then they are gone. I'm mystified why creating a separate partition and putting My Documents there is not part of a Windows standard installation.

John