Should You Partition Your Hard Drive? - Comments Page 2

Glad to see yet another great article. I used to do partitions for data - and yes it does help with simplifying backups and restores. When I was the IT for a major companys area offices in the 90s this made good sense. But today people tend to ignore backups and assume drives last forever.
One idea that I used but I did not see mentioned was that the minimum file size was different depending on the size of the drive, due to the number of addressable clusters in the directory scheme. So if you had many smaller files, a small partition would allow each to use a smaller space. With thousands of small text files, this could make a noticeable space savings. When I operated a BBS I did that - having one smaller partition and 4 or 5 larger ones - and then placing the folders of small text files all on that small partition. The BBS eventually grew to several large drives and maybe 6 partitions total. While it helped to manage and grow the system to have that - it was sometimes difficult to work with.
Today, retired, I do sometimes use a emptied restore partition for backup of customers data just in case, but while this saves the day on some incidents, it of course is seldom any help with drive failures.
And yes - I bet Bobs 5mg drive was at least 300$. My first HD was a hard sectored Micropolis that retailed around 1k.. but that was before PCs, and a horse of a different color.. (Mpm and CPM days) BOB - Keep up the good work!!

I don't like the Windows model where each partition is treated as a separate drive and gets a drive letter. The UNIX model of one directory tree and partitions simply mapped to "file names" is much easier. Windows is sort of doing this by access data via "Library" names, e.g. Documents, Music and so on. These can point to areas on other drives.

I still keep separate partitions on separate disks but that is because I do dual boot with Linux and I keep all O/S's on one drive and data on the other.

I tend to go along with the "data separate" crowd, as in case of corruption to the OS the data may still be safe. These days I am starting to use small, fast SSDs for the OS and programs and a large HDD for data, including Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos and Downloads. I also back up the data files to other drives on my network. Family pix and docs (irreplaceable) should probably be backed up to off-site, but I'm not there, yet.

I have never partitioned. I don't have that much data on my computer. I mostly have causal games and when the computer goes haywire, I have to re-install the games anyway.

I prefer to back up things like my photos on disks and my external HD. I don't take that many photos either, so there isn't that many on my computer.

Hello Bob
Yet another thought-provoking article. I use separate physical drives for OS & programs, another for data. But I use freefilesync to regularly backup my data to the OS disc, and occasionally use disk cloning to make a back-up copy of my OS & programs on a third drive.
I'll shortly be installing Linux, so will need to partition my C drive to accommodate it.
My helpful suggestion, to manage these different locations, is to keep a small notebook as a log of which back-ups/syncs I have done, when and to where. Been doing this for thirty years and occasionally found it invaluable.
Oh yes, don't forget to back up your registry and email client files regularly.....

I, too, have wondered for ages why must I have partitions. I'm just about to invest in a new laptop and I bet it will have at least two drives. Is it possible to then make it into just one drive - or is that totally fraught with danger? And if it is indeed possible - how?

Many of the responses seem to be mixing banana with oranges. They talk about using multiple drives, whereas the article relates to using multiple partitions on a single drive. They are not the same.
I used to use multiple partitions with Win 3.x, 95 and 98. Partition Magic was a great tool for making dynamic partition changes. One advantage was that each partition was viewed as a separate drive, which allowed for smaller sectors. Thus a single extra bit would waste less space.
I had my OS, application programs and data in different partitions. This was OK at first as back then most programs were self-contained. As more began using shared folders (on the C drive), it became more of a hassle. When (not if) I needed to reinstall the OS, these programs also had to be reinstalled.
When my OS allowed NTFS instead of FAT, I quit using partitions. NTFS made much more effective use of the space. I found using individual folders for each type of date (labeled to show the type), much like Windows does. This was more useful than partitioning – no size adjustments needed. Unfortunately, with a single computer and only 1 HD, backup was restricted to removable media (Span Disk allowed putting large files on several floppies).
When people I knew wanted to upgrade their computers, they wanted some way to dispose of the old one. I was happy to accept the free castaways. This gave me a lot of extra drives – by then many computers had room for 3 or 4 HDs. Later I was able to buy some good inexpensive external HD cases for them. Thus I entered the second category – multiple drives. But that is a different topic.

For some time now I have used the internal drive for windows 10 and programmes. All my user data is on a 1 Tb sshd. I feel safer doing this and if I go away can put the sshd in my pocket and have all my data safe and relatively secure. (I do manual backups of the ssd). If everything is on the internal hard disc a disc failure is going to take a long time to sort.

I used to create a second partition for data, so that if the OS died, my data was "safe." Unfortunately my wife's computer, set up this way died during one of Microsoft's Windows 10 upgrades, and destroyed the data partition (not as well backed up as I thought) as well as the OS partition. I decided a second partition was not as useful as a good back-up plan. I now have her data backed up three ways daily.

Hi Bob.
I used to partition my drives. But my last couple of computers I have been using multiple drives, instead of partitions. I run an SSD as the primary for the operating system, then 4 terabyte drives dedicated to documents, photos, programs, and everything else. Easy way to remember what goes on which drive is to rename the drive!That way it shows in the directory as drive D: Documents!

I have tried partitioning on my W7 laptop. I wanted to make a smaller programs partition (about 75 GB) that I deemed sufficient. The system disagreed! Minimum partition size allowed by W7 was 225 GB! I had a 500 GB hard drive. This meant that 150 GB of disc space was simply not available for data. I nixed the idea. I have no problems and do not miss partitioning.

I have always kept my OS and programs on C: drive and all my personal data on another drive because that way, I can re-install my OS without having to worry about losing any of my personal files! And I'm very surprised to hear that someone who is supposed to be a techie doesn't.

Also ONE BIG reason you might want to have your OS and programs on C: and all your personal data on a separate disc entirely is if you buy a small SSD, to use for your OS.

We always need more storage as our data grows, so we buy a new, larger, hard drive. This gets a new drive letter, so it's natural to re-arrange our data to put things like photos (which really eat up the gigabytes) on the new drive and leave the other data on the old drive.

Using this philosophy, I now have six internal drives in my main computer! The C drive is a small (240 GB) SSD, which has Windows 10 and all the installed programs. The next 2 drives have photos (which I take lots of) and other data. The other 3 have older (slower) drives to backup the first 3. All these drives are installed in two "StarTech 3 hard drive mobile racks," which only take two slots each. This makes it easy to remove the backup drives when they're not in use, just in case the whole PC crashes. And if I go on vacation, I lock up all the drives in a safe.

If you don't have a large enough case to hold multiple drives, you can buy external enclosures to do the same thing. Or use several external hard drives (which often are on sale.) Hard drives are so cheap, there's no reason not to have several.

And for safety, don't keep your data files on the same drive as the OS. As Bob empathized, if the OS drive gets hosed, you lose any data stored there too. And, although it takes some time, you should be able to re-install the OS and all your programs if you need to. Your data is safer on a separate drive and even safer if it's backed up.

Sheri posted this same idea on 22 Oct 2016, and I agree completely.

If you have multiple partitions on a hard drive and then that drive fails, you lose all of the partitions.

Even if you have backups, will you remember exactly where everything was, on which partitions, when they are all gone? And what size each partition was, so that you can re-create the same partition scheme on a replacement hard drive?

Short answer: NO.

A hard drive may go bad years after you set up multiple partitions, and your memory of the partitioning scheme will have faded. Just don't do it. It's a hassle you don't need. Use a single partition.

I agree completely with Bob's single partition strategy BUT I have separate partitions for system & programs (C:) and data (D:).
Why? Because my C: drive is an 256Mb SSD and the D:drive is a 2Tb hard disk. Performance and load times are great! Couldn't afford a big SSD, so two partitions necessary.

I partition my hard drive because I have some important programs that run only on Windows XP. They are on one side, the up-to-date Windows is on the other.

I agree - these days, multiple partitions usually just needlessly complicate things. And separate partitions and separate hard drives are two different animals.
And lol to the hard drive size sub-thread - I had (and still have) a 16K plug-in RAM expansion for my Timex-Sinclair ZX81, and it uses a cassette tape recorder to record and load programs. Ah - those were the days! :-D

I echo Sheri's comment. I fail to see how it can not be a good idea, for the reason Sheri specified. Over the years there have been many occasions, for various reasons, where I have had to re-install Windows on mine or friends PC's. I agree that it is better to use an external drive but it would seem very good sense to me to partition the drive to provide C for system and D for personal files and to also back up to an external drive.

I have sysprepped my install. Windows and programs are on C physical drive. User folders and data are forced on D physical drive.

I image everyday C and D with Macrium Reflect Home on two swapped external E drives. If something happens, I am free to restore C only. However, I can also chose to restore C and D to have the exact same picture that was taken at backup. This might be necessary in case something is out of sync between programs and "data" (data being an elastic notion here). However, that would make me lose the more recent actual data, such as documents I have created.

I also have a Z partition on the system drive, next to C, for playing with Linux some time in the future. I also have an F temporary partition on my data disk next to D, which I used for a data restore. I did not want to dump the restore on D and risk the consequences. So I'm slowly choosing and picking manually from F to put back into D - not finished yet.

Separation of programs and data in Windows is a mess. It can and should be tweaked, but there's no way to get it fully right.

I did read somewhere, by a credible source, that the swap file is better separated from C.

I have been using 3 partitions/disks for ages: Windows, programs and data. Data has been put into a different disk as soon as I could afford (20 or so years ago), so remembering is not really a problem.
What is a problem now is that Micro$oft, since Windows 10, refuses to install its programs on drive D! Office is one that I tried a couple of times before giving up. It won't run from a drive other than C, no matter how much you change your registry.
And program settings in the registry is the stupidest idea I ever heard. It gets impossible to do a simple program transfer/recover.
That's what we get for using Windows :-(