Origin of "partition" in storage devices

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2022 at 10:14, Joshua Rice via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Of course, doing it that way has many disadvantages, not least the
> fragmentation issue (which was the root cause of much periodic slowdown
> on Windows machines in the mid 00's), but also the overheads involved
> with transferring rather scattered and unorganised RAM contents into
> nice, neat blocks understood by the filesystem. Though i have no numbers
> to back up my claims, i'm sure the overheads involved in translating RAM
> contents to a file was much more significant than just dumping the RAM
> contents into a SWAP partition.

Yeah... there were folk beliefs about how positioning on the disk made
a big difference, too.

When PartitionMagic came out, it caused me some fun. When I joined _PC
Pro_ magazine (at Issue 8) we had a copy of v1 in the cupboard. Its
native OS was OS/2 and nobody cared, I'm afraid. I read what it
claimed and didn't believe it so I didn't try it.

Then v2 arrived. It ran on DOS. Repartitioning a hard disk when it was
full of data? Preposterous! Impossible!

So I tried it. It worked. I wrote a rave review.

It prompted a reader letter.

"I think I've spotted your April Fool's piece. A DOS program that
looks exactly like a Windows 95 app? Which can repartition a hard disk
full of data? Written by someone whose name is an anagram of 'APRIL
VENOM'? Do I win anything?"
He won a phonecall from me, but he did teach me an anagram of my name
I never knew.

It led me to run a tip in the mag...

At the time, a 1.2 GB hard disk was the most common size (and a
Quantum Fireball the fastest model for the money). Format that as a
single FAT16 partition and you got super-inefficient 16 kB clusters.
(And in 1995 or early 1996, FAT16 was all you got.)

With PartitionMagic, you could take 200 MB off the end, make it into a
2nd partition, and *still fit more onto the C: drive* because of far
more efficient 8 kB clusters. If you didn't have PQMagic you could
partition the disk that way before installing.

The only key thing was that C: was less than 1 GB. 0.99 GB was fine.

I suggested making a D: drive and putting the swap file on it -- you
saved space and reduced fragmentation.

One of our favourite small PC builders, Panrix, questioned this. They
reckoned that having the swap file on the outer, longer tracks of the
drive made it slower, due to slower access times and slower transfer
speeds. They were adamant.

So I got them to bring in a new, virgin PC with Windows 95A, I
benchmarked it with a single big, inefficient C: partition, then I
repartitioned it, put the swapfile on the new D: drive, and
benchmarked it again. It was the same to 2 decimal places, and the C
drive had about 250MB more free space.

Panrix apologised and I gained another geek cred point. :-)

-- 
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