Should You Partition Your Hard Drive? - Comments Page 1

I STILL partition my HD to keep DATA in a separate partition. I can wipe / reinstall the system and software, without disturbing my data. It makes backup of data so much simpler!!

Thanks again Bob.

I have been thinking about this for some time and when I saw the email I thought I might eventually get round to partitioning the drives.

You can imagine how happy I was to see that I didn't have to bother and that I hadn't been being LAZY but doing the right thing.

You have made my day yet again!

Jon

I also partition my HD with data on a separate partition, as it was the done thing years ago, but now it is partly out of necessity. My family history software expects to see all the photos and documents (thousands of them) on the D drive and to change all the paths would take forever.

I TOTALLY agree with Louise. I partition my drive in 2 parts, one for the OS and one for data. I don't believe in D: for music, E: for video, F: for photos, etc. One separate data drive is plenty...and I do send all of my data there. That way, I can reload my OS and programs, if necessary, without losing my data.

I have two partitions : 1) Windows+programs+swap, 2) My data.
This allows me to take the smallest possible backup image of the system drive, which I do regularly. This way, whenever Windows or some program becomes broken, I can return the last backup to restore my system to a working state. This has saved me a few times from needing to reinstall Windows.

Solved for me very easily
Extra 1 TB drive in computer so all my data is on that D drive. And gives me double the room.

And I'll bet that 10 MG drive cost you $100

I learned the hard way, a long time ago (hint: MS Windows 3.1), that keeping the system on one partition and the OS on another was a good way to avoid loosing my data when the system became corrupted, and I needed to re-format the partition to re-install the OS.

I do not agree with the advice of this article. Regardless of your OS, I feel better keeping my data on a separate partition or better yet disk. I actually use a two separate physical drives for data, one for multi-media and one for documents and other types of data. It is so easy now to up grade the OS. Instead of upgrading, I now can easily do a new install or even upgrade/swap OS disks. And managing back ups is a breeze as well. I keep a mirror image of my data files and at least weekly images of the OS drive. Any issues with a OS, just apply your back up without fear of what data might be missing.

BobR says, "I recommend that you stick with one large partition." Since Windows 7, a 'clean' install of Windows creates *2* partitions by default, a relatively tiny system partition for boot information, and everything else (OS, Programs and user data) in the second.
It makes eminent sense to separate OS&Programs from user data if a combination of SSD (fast and expensive) and HDD (really, really big and cheap) are used. The C drive is on the SSD holds the OS and programs, and most of the user data is on drive D, the HDD.
Why only "most" of the data? - Windows offers an easy way to move 'My Documents,' 'My Pictures,' 'My Music,' etc. to alternate locations. Just right-click folder, properties, and click the location tab. Works great for most user data folders, but not all; AppData, for example, can't be moved so easily.

Extending the thought of having system in one partition and data in another, I have Windows 7 on C, and data on an external USB drive.
This saved my bacon when my attempt to upgrade to Windows 10 bricked my desktop computer. My old laptop handled the external data disk nicely.

What about a small 250gb SSD for system and 1tb HD for everything else. Iv'e been doing that for years and it seems to work for me

This just totally confuses things! The only one I would consider is a data partition. But for the average User it is a mute point. They just want it to work and could care less how things are laid out.

Having a separate partition for user installed programs serves no useful purpose. I agree because I have tried.

I have a D: for documents and G: for media, i.e. music, photo and video. I even assign my usual C:\user and download files to reside in D: or G:. This is to ensure as far as possible that I have only Win and programs in C: and no data at all. I am the only user of this PC. This minimizes my system backup file size and backup time. If I have to reinstall from a system image, I know my data are intact in the other partitions. I perform disk backup, full or incremental on the other two partitions.

I've asked Geeks, friends, been online for hours to understand what the heck partitioning is, why it is, how to do it, and have not got a good understanding of the whole issue,, UNTILL NOW.

Thank you Bob, you're smart, gifted, talented and experienced and you have a knack for making the confusing, simple and vey understandable. At 66, you've taught an old dog lots of new tricks since I found you.

Since starting with computers in 1987, I can only remember one computer (a Sony laptop, so you can get a sense of how long ago it was) where I had to deal with partitions. I had to adjust the size of the partitions because one was too small for some reason. I successfully merged them into one drive, and carried on from there. Other than that, having one C: drive has always worked fine for me. [As an aside, "accommodate" is one of the most frequently misspelled words (see paragraph 3 of the article). Correct spelling should be important in both the comments and the article.]

Bill wants to bet you'didn't paid $100 for that 10mb HD way back when..

I think it was closer to $300!

Just an old timer

I agree with the no partitioning for data scheme. Keep it simple. However I wonder why the industry is still using "C" as the default drive. We are long past floppy drives etc., why not use "A".

I backup by doing full disk (actually sector)images. I partitioned one laptop and put archived materials in the D partition as a way to speed up the imaging process. It seems to help, but after a few years of never touching the archived materials, maybe next time I'll just delete them.

Oh and my first hard drive was 5 megabytes. It came from Radio Shack for the TRS-80. There were no such things as directories or folders. File names were limited to 8 letters. The files themselves seldom exceeded 5kB. After a year there were hundreds of files on the drive, and it was a real pain to find the ones you wanted.

As many others I work find with 2 partitios.
But on data disk, C;disk SSD 512 is ok for systems
win 10 and xp.
2° disk 4T is divided into partitions of 2T each, one for all junk, the other for movie, foto, etc...

By the way my first hd was 5mb....and cost me a fortune...