How many partitions can one have?

[traveler]

Whith the size of drives getting bigger and bigger and with the desire of manageable sized partitions, how many partitions can one computer have?

Are we limited to 26 partitions as per the letters of the alphabet? Or is there a way to setup more than 26 drive partitions, mapped network drives, opticals, card readers, externals, etc. all at once?



__________________

Visit and chat with the Buds at the #ABxZone channel on EFnet Internet Relay Chat
If you don't have it then download mIRC from www.mIRC.com

[pointreyes]

Assigning drive letters to partitions is a Windows bane. You can have quite a bit of partitions but do you really want to remember them by "drive letters"? I prefer using partition names which you could do with Windows (with networked shared locations) but to make them easier to access on say Windows Explorer requires using that stupid Windows drive letter scheme. So your question is kind of two-fold - if you are using Windows are you limited to the arcane Microsoft drive lettering. And the second question, how many partitions can a drive manage?

1) I access network drives in the Windows world without reverting to the drive letter. However, Disk Management on Windows appears to point to only be allowed to access a partition by drive letter on local drives.

2) A hard drive working at the level lower than Microsoft can have up to 32 primary partitions (if you use Ranish; otherwise, the limit is 4) and extended partitions are unlimited.

[k0NG0]

Thing is, filesystems haven't really kept up. Well, there's ZFS but good luck running that natively in Windows, and it's not ideal for desktop use anyway. Filesystems for gigantic drives should be automatically free of practically any fragmentation. Especially with multi-core systems, it would be fairly easy (although still pretty dang hard, heh) to allocate a low-level process to take care of any such shuffling in the background. Not really by doing proper defragmentation in the current sense, but by having a filesystem that's self-diagnostic and self-optimizing. (Preferably flat, just supporting views instead of hierarchical and sucky.)

Generally, I wonder if it's beneficial with a lot of partitions at all, beyond the issues with fragmentation. (I'd be willing to bet in most cases a partition goes bad, it's directly related to drive failure, barring all cases where one's actually been actively poking at the partition table manually.) For integrity, RAID would be the best strategy all 'round.

For my 500GB drive, I just made it a single partition and use folders for the various things I do. It'll take a honkin' long time to defrag, possibly, but it's one of those set-and-forget deals anyway, that can run over night, or scheduled, when it does run.