I have a fairly old computer (Intel Pentium 4, 1.5 GHz, 512mb RAM) and I'm looking to optimize it a little to see if I can sqeeze some more speed out of it. My hard drive is only 60gb, and it's split into two partitions. The C drive is 16gb and it's my primary drive. Every bit of space is used up on that one and I'm always getting "Your running out of free space" notifications. It's on the FAT32 system. On the other hand, my D drive is 39gb and there is literally nothing on it, I still have 39gb of space free. This one is on the NTFS file system. So instead of letting all that free space go to waste, I thought I would merge the partitions. I downloaded PartitionMagic 8, and it appears I cannot merge a FAT32 and a NTFS, so I need to convert one. I starting doing some research and it appears that NTFS is the superior file system, but that it usually performs higher for bigger HDD's and lower on smaller HDDs than FAT32. I didn't know if 60gb was defined as "small" or not, so that is one of my questions. My other question is, is converting my C drive to NTFS safe? Will it erase or affect any of my files on there? Is there any reason I would want to keep my HDD partitioned? And I only have one operating system installed, so I don't believe partioning benefits me. But would merging these two partitions make my HDD slower? Should I keep the two partitions and just offload some of my files to the second partition? Thanks if anyone can help, I know it's a long read
Im not sure about this, but I think that the NTFS file system is better for indexing, i dont know. FAT32 is just the one below that, and I think it would cater for the smaller hard drives. As for the two partitions, I would suggest merging the hard drives into FAT32 after backing up everything, then re-partition. Then you would install Windows on one, and keep the other one for your files. I dont know how well that would work but, just a suggestion.
