so my harddrive is in 2 different sections. this may sound dumb, but what kind of stuff is in each section? I double clicked the D: drive and it just had my pictures in there, but I think my pictures were in my C: drive? so.. how do I know what drive i'm saving something to when I am saving it?

you can chose where you save things whenever you save them

to be fair idk why manufacturers partition drives, it makes more sense to leave it as an entire drive

if you wanted you could acquire something like partition magic to merge the two drives.

oh, so its pretty much just like 2 giant folders?

Yeah basically.

You have nothing on that D drive :p

Anyway. On systems with 1 physical disk, I always partition two drives. Usually one about 96% of the space, and the other about the size of 2x the Physical RAM. Even if it's the same HDD, having the swap on the system partition causes heavy filesystem fragmentation. Simply moving swap to a non-system partition, albeit on the same physical disk, will greatly help the condition the FS is in.

haha yeah, I noticed that pictures folder in there (which was the only one) must have been a copied folder because itw as the exact same as the one on my C: drive.

but on the subject of harddrives, I bought a gamebridge (the thing shipping from the UK, FYI) and am wondering how much space it takes up when recording? say if I record video for 1 hour straight, how many GB's of space would it take up on my harddrive?

I thought that partitioning your drive so that the C drive only holds Windows, while D drive holds everything else helps make the comp run smoother?

Marginally, at best, most likely it would go unnoticed. Many programs still have to be installed on the system partition. Applications are often more responsible for filesystem fragmentation over user file movement. But fragmentation isn't really an issue on NTFS/XFS/EXT/Reiser systems.

I/O becomes an issue, when the system begins to have the need to read system files, program files, data files and swap from one physical disk, issues can arise. However, the only way to rectify that would be if data files are read from another physical disk.

more like recovery becomes smother,
i always partision my dirve, always install my email and everything i wanna keep on the partion,
so if anything goes badly wrong with the OS then i don't loose anything on a quick format reinstall.

I used to partition my drives in three,

Core stuff on one (OS, Office, browsers)
Documents and Games on another
and swap on the last (but at the start of the disk, as this gives a faster read/write speed as it's closer to the middle of the platter)

Now I use a fixed size swap and use diskeeper to prioritize where my files end up on the disk. (only one partition, though two drives)

That's smart, since the read speed of disks is holding back a lot of advancements in technology. Our current CPUs and RAM are being held back by how fast we can store our calculated data permanently.