Xbox Live Gold Price Increasing to $60/year

[A Black Falcon]

I like partitions. I got used to them back in the '90s when Windows had a 2GB per partition limit, and ever since I've been used to organizing stuff by partition -- this stuff goes on this partition, that stuff on that partition, etc. It's a nice way to break stuff up. Of course stuff spills over, so I have games installed on almost all partitions, but still, it's a good organizational tool. I use the file system for organization, after all, so stuff like that matters. :)

But GR, even if I didn't partition my drives it's not like it'd make much of a difference for Steam, unless I was (as I said) so stupid as to actually use Raid 0, which I never would.

I mean, I have 90GBs of Steam games installed, and that's without installing some games that I technically own (from bundles) but haven't played, like HL2 episodes 1 and 2, Teamfortress 2, etc. That's a very large amount, and it would be even bigger if I installed everything I could, nearly 100GBs I'd bet. Because DD stuff must install the whole game to your hard drive and storing data on a disc is not possible, installs are huge.

50GBs of that 90 has been moved and redirected with Link Shell (the app I mentioned above), so that it's on a different drive and Steam only thinks it's on drive C, where Steam is. But what if I didn't have each drive partitioned?

Well, C has 2.5GBs free and E 12GBs, so there's about 15GB. Oh wait, 15 versus 50... which half of my Steam data do I choose to delete just because Valve are idiots, in a world where I don't know about Link Shell? I guess I'd have to rearrange my whole hard drives' organization system just to find a place for it, but that's ridiculous. I should not have to design my computer organization system around their wishes, they should allow the user to do things how they wish, as EVERY OTHER PC GAME AND DD SERVICE PRETTY MUCH EVER does.

I really can't think of a modern reason to have multiple partitions on one drive. Drive failure doesn't tend to take out whole partitions if a small section gets corrupted these days (the drives can automatically account for that). The sort of failure that does that is the sort that will take out the magnetic head alignment entirely and thus takes out all partitions with it anyway.

And that's why Raid 0 is so, so dangerous -- while with a normal arrangement (different partitions on each drive, or at least one per disk) if one of your HDDs goes bad at least your partitions on other drives should still be fine, with Raid 0, because it makes all of your drives into one giant partition, with no redundancy, if one drive goes bad you lose EVERYTHING. I knew someone in college who had that happen to them. Sure it's "convenient" for some people (not for me of course, but for some people), but is it really worth the risk?

Still though, it is possible to have a kind of error that knocks out a partition but not the drive it's on...

most of those games (aside from Valve's own) will still let you run them without the Steam client at all.

That's a good point, I really need to correct those Start menu links so that they go to the games directly, not to Steam. It'd be great to not have to launch Steam every time I want to play a game that I happen to have bought in Steam, you need to wait for both Steam and then the game to launch, and that's a little annoying.