And they don't often install other operating systems, negating that benefit. While partitioning isn't overly complex, it also introduces some potential for issues for a novice user. Compared to the low benefit, it's generally not worth the effort for them to partition. Many of the historical reasons for partitioning don't matter as much now, due to the widespread inclusion of SSDs in modern computers. See the below section for a discussion on this.
As you may be aware, older hard disk drives HDD are mechanical. They have moving platters and a head that reads and writes data. Because of this, the organization of data on the drive affects how quickly you can access it. If the drive has to spin all around to access bits of data that are far apart from each other, it will affect performance.
For some time, partitioning was a solution for this. Your primary partition, with Windows installed, would live at the outside of the platter which has the fastest read times. Less important data, like downloads and music, could stay on the inside.
Separating data also helps defragmentation, an important part of HDD maintenance, run faster. But none of this applies to solid-state drives SSD. They use flash memory to quickly access information no matter where it's located on the drive.
Thus, optimizing the placement of files on the disk is not a concern. And you don't need to defragment SSDs. Don't worry about "wearing out" your SSD by partitioning it, by the way. The SSD organizes files on its own regardless of the partitions, so there's no "uneven wear" issue.
Decided that you want to create a new partition on your hard drive? We have you covered. Check out our guide to managing hard drive partitions in Windows We've looked at some pros and cons of partitioning your disk.
In summary, the potential hassle involved, compared to the relatively small gain for the average user, means you should probably stick to what you have now. But partitioning offers benefits for power users who want logical separation of data and don't mind juggling free space. Here are the differences between advertised vs. He left his IT job to write full-time in and has never looked back.
He's been covering tech tutorials, video game recommendations, and more as a professional writer for over seven years. What Is Disk Partitioning? Share Share Tweet Email. Ben Stegner Articles Published. Subscribe to our newsletter Join our newsletter for tech tips, reviews, free ebooks, and exclusive deals! Why to partition, Leo? Your hard drive is a filing cabinet. Yes, you have created folders in it.
But this drawer might have , folders in it. Good luck looking through all that! It could be perfectly alphabetical, but the sheer size of it makes it unwieldy. My partitioned drive has drawers C:, D:, E: and F: where I can store folders related to work applications in one drawer, multimedia files in a second, games files in a third and so on, making it much easier to find things without having to search a single drawer the size of a small country.
THAT is why we partition drives. I organize things in folders anyway, not partitions. Definitely partition. I typically install my OS I run Windows and always clean install instead of upgrading. Once I have customized my settings and installed all patches and applications I create an image of my C partition. Eventually after a number of months, performance starts to degrade as garbage piles up Windows has never done a good job with garbage collection.
At that point I replace my C partition with the previously made image, apply all outstanding patches then make a new image. I like partitions!! I keep! The hard.. My Vista laptop came with two partitions, and a hidden one for the OS Restore. The second visible partition was for data.
The C, E, and hidden drives drove me nuts and the second drives were always confused. I gave up, killed the partition nonsense, reformatted and installed new. Partitions are outdated, unnecessary, and usually cause later problems. I use my C Drive to run the computer and try to keep it small. I for Opus programs. At the end I have five drives that are external drives. With this setup, if you have an unrecoverable crash you can just reformat and reinstal Windows and lose none of your data.
If you just have the C drive and are not particularly computer savvy you are likely to lose all your data. I have always used just the one partition but recently decided to go for two partitions; one for OS and installed programs C — second for data only G.
I store full system images on external HDD, and that system gives me much smaller images to work with. Means quicker creation and restoration times plus uses less space on external hard drive.
Doing it this way the folders can grow to any size instead of dealing with the problem of one of the partitions outgrowing its size.
In 30 years I have never lost my D, E or F drives partitioned 2 drives but many, many times have had to re-install my c drive backup. In most cases file corruption or virus attacks will happen to the main drive not to general program areas. I have only ever backed up my c drive and always to a usb drive with perfect results. With the speed of modern drives it is not necessary to partition a drive. If you have never had a hard drive fail, then you are about due. They all have mechanical moving parts and will eventually fail.
I would never trust my important data to just one location. I work for a HD manufacture and have talked with hundreds if not thousands of people who have lost their data because it is not backed up.
Backup is a fraction of the cost of Data Recovery. I want to just have my hard disc with one C partition how do I remove D and save all data to C at the same time. Well, to each his own opinion. After managing backups on dozens of office computers for several companies over the last 15 years, I have learned this: Almost any single partition hard drive can be salvaged using a variety of methods.
The only times I have seen catastrophic loss of data was on hard drives with multiple partitions. Ask anyone who has lost mission critial data.
Once that happens, they often become converts to single partitions. Internally, I would use the second HD for all of my personal data and suchlike, including a Downloads Folder with separate Sub-Folders for each downloaded ancillary, whether those be programs or files. Still internally, I would have automatic back-ups to the original HD, which would also contain the usual programs, systems etc such as Windows.
Generally those main systems such as Windows have some form of Recovery such as CDs, without a need to backup. Externally, as I am actually running, I have been forced to use the internal HD for all of my personal requirements including the Downloads Folder; and as supplied, it has a D: Partition with the general Systems, Windows etc. Whilst it is fairly easy to find out the range of standard programs such as Windows, required to do a Recovery, it is more difficult to keep track of all those miscellaneous programs, routines etc garnered over the years.
This is where the Downloads Folder comes in to play, being an inherent Aide-Memoire of those programs. I have four hard disks in my computer. Partitioning just the first one 1TB as C: and D: was advantegous for me because the system files and some software that insisted on C: were causing frequent fragmentation problems and if left as a whole, every defrag would have taken hours.
Now with C: sized as MB, defrag takes only about minutes. I found out that D: and other drives need defragging only once or twice a year which can be done overnight. Another advantage is the infections and searches are usually in C: and scans are much quicker this way. It is also easy to back up all the drive to a fraction of one of the 1. I used to have several partions but now have the same 3 on each of 3 hard drives in 2 removable caddies:- C for OS and programs. D for downloaded Program installation files and E for all my data.
I regularly clone the whole of drive 1 to drive 2 using Paragon Drive Copy. Then remove it and insert the drive 3 to which I copy the following week or so. All 3 drives are fully bootable. I also have a tendency to forget which partition I put a particular file, picture, or whatever in. This is also a very easy way when you install a program, yet make it accessible from either desktop.
Hope this helps some of you. I have been doing this for years, and as I have my own company with quite a bit of work, I can honestly say, that this is very good! The last partition is ONLY for back-up purposes. Hope this helps! As Leo pointed out, multiple partitions in a single physical drive do not protect you against hard disk failure and, yes, since it may cause files you need concurrently to be physically distant from each other on the hard disk, due to partitioning, it will slow down the computer being that hard disk reading is one of the slowest things a computer does.
Certainly, Windows files are being used almost constantly. If you place your data files in another partition, the reading mechanism will be jumping all over if you happen to need to scan a large database. What would be the reason for supplying new computers with partitioned hard disks? At present, the disk with GB can be seen everywhere with the expansion of computer disk space, so to partition a hard drive with a large amount of space become more and more urgent.
How to partition a hard drive? Maybe use 3rd-party partition utility. So kind of you! The more useful information I have found throuth the article—Guidelines on how to partition a hard drive by Creating, Deleting, Formatting and Resizing Partition.
Share with you all. Hi,I deleted the partition on my hard drive,i deleted the D drive and i was left with the drive labelled C. So far so good!! I thought if i deleted the D drive,the capacity i was deleteing would be transferred to the C drive,so doubling the C drive. Why has this happened,i have restarted the Samsung NC10 but still no gain in the C drive. Thanks Alan. Is a partition useful against virus attack?
I think to duplicate data in D and E disk-partition so if one is attacked, I have the back-up here in the same hard drive. Is it OK? Hi Leo — good article. In context of size of hard drives these days, is this a reason not to partition? In fact, it would tend to decrease usable space. If one drive fills up to almost full, some of the free space in the drive might become unusable.
I find partitioning very useful in organising major types of data such as: documents, software, movies, recovery, projects. Its also very useful because when the system goes down, only c: drive is affected none of the data. I also have a second internal hard drive for backup of the first drive. External hard drives are useless, two of them went down with mechanical failure.
Hi Leo, Thanks for nice explanation. My new laptop is configured with a single partition having window7 installed in it. What you suggest? Rgds, Bhupender. Hi Leo, Thanks for your prompt reply. My system is also having a one key recovery feature, changing the partition size will also make the recovery feature useless, as it will not work. So I will go with you and not planning to go for hardisk partitioning any more. Also i have already purchased a good licensed antivirus software to make the system secure.
Just one more query, I have heard about system restore application of windows, i just wanted to know how effective it is in case of some malware attack. Although i can any time revert to the factory setting using one key recovery feature, but this will make me loose many of the installed applications. Best Regards, Bhupender. Bhupender System restore can do very little in helping to recover from a virus.
You might find these articles useful Can I get rid of spyware using system restore? Hi, i download a lot of movies and regularly change what games im playing, which means im constantly moving watched movies to a portable hard-drive and sometimes back again to watch. On an average month i would transfer gig of data between my main drive and my portable drives. Is this data transfer high enough that i would be better off partitioning my hard drive into system plus main programs and data files? Since installing Win 8, the backup image would be quickly outdated due to updated versions of software i regularly use.
Although i still have a small encrypted partition and a large one for big, rarely accessed PDF files. I have opted for partitioning in order to be able to install the main OS on the C drive but then install all other programs on the D drive the partition.
That way if I ever need to format the C drive alone as part of some sort of maintenance I will not have to lose precious time reinstalling all the programs.
However I have never come to this point until now…and although I am about to reinstall my precious C drive with the main OS as it has slowed considerably, I have no clue whatsoever how to recall he programs installed on the D drive.
Can you help me with this, please? Dan Installing your programs on the D: drive is an interesting idea, but unfortunately, if you reinstall the OS, the installed programs will no longer work. When a program is installed, it makes changes to the registry and usually installs files in various places on the c: drive.
Thanks for your feedback. Choose where you want to search below Search Search the Community. Search the community and support articles Windows Windows 10 Search Community member. This thread is locked.
You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread. I have the same question Report abuse. Details required :. Cancel Submit. Ken Blake. Do you mean is it necessary to have multiple partitions?
Here's an article I wrote on the subject a while back: Planning Your Partitions. How many partitions should I have on my hard drive, what should I use each one for, and how big should each of them be? You have to have at least one partition on it to use it. The choice you have is whether to have more than one partition, not whether to partition at all. Because only 16 bits were used for addressing, FAT16 has a maximum partition size of 2Gb.
Hard drives larger than 2GB were rare in those days, but if you had one, you had to have multiple partitions to use all the available space.
But even if your drive was no bigger than 2GB, FAT16 created another severe problem for many people—the size of the cluster was bigger if you had a bigger partition.
Cluster sizes went from bytes for a partition no bigger than32Mb all the way up to 32Kb for a partition of 1Gb or greater. The larger the cluster size, the more space is wasted on a hard drive.
If you have 32Kb clusters, a 1-byte files takes 32Kb, a file one byte larger than 32Kb takes 64Kb, and so on. On the average, each file wastes about half of its last cluster.
With a 2GB FAT16 drive in a single cluster, if you have 10, files, each wasting half of a 32Kb cluster, you waste about Mb to slack. So what did people do? They partitioned their 2GB drive into two, three, or more logical drives. Each of those logical drives was smaller than the real physical drive, had smaller clusters, and therefore less waste. If, for example, they could keep all partitions under Mb, cluster size was only 8Kb, and the waste was reduced to a quarter of what it would otherwise be.
People partitioned for other reasons too, but back in the days of FAT16, this was the main reason for doing so.
0コメント