Does partitioning a hard drive give a performance gain?

Solution 1:

In the absence of specific data about your use of your specific system, the optimal partitioning scheme to adopt would be a single partition. To get best performance make the partition at the outer edge of the disk, make it no larger than needed for the files and leave the rest of the disk unused.

If you make multiple partitions you run the risk of decreasing performance as the disk is forced to make head movements between groups of files at the start of each partition and to maintain multiple filesystem metadata.

In theory you can optimise the placement of frequently accessed files, but partitioning is an extremely crude way to achieve this and if done without careful gathering of statistics is likely to fail to achieve a benefit. For example, on my PC I suspect the most used files are the registry and in Chrome's cache-directory. I think constructing a partitioning scheme around that might be difficult, the most used files may be scattered in disparate folders.

Update

As MSalters commented, Designers of filesystems like NTFS, EXT4 etc go to considerable lengths to optimise their performance. Though of course they also place a high value on reliability and resilience which mean making trade-offs that affect performance.

Opinion: As with so many things it is therefore often counter-productive for end-users to try to second guess the decisions made by operating system developers. For most of us it may be best to configure systems the way we believe OS designers expect most people to do. In other words set things up in the simplest and most straightforward way, accept most of the defaults suggested by the operating system installer. Only if your use-case is very unusual and performance critical might it be worthwhile tuning the installation manually. For example, if I were asked to build a commercial cluster of dedicated Oracle DBMS servers, rather than worry about raw vs cooked filesystems I'd probably just use Oracle's Linux distro and expect it to do the right thing. If serious money was involved I would pay an Oracle consultant to make sure the right configuration options were selected. For the average desktop PC this should be completely unnecessary.