Should You Partition Your Hard Drive? - Comments Page 3

Running dual boot, using Ubuntu as the primary OS and Windows 7 for those tasks where I don't have a good Linux alternative, I partition one drive for Windows, a second for Ubuntu, a third for the Ubuntu swap, and a separate D: drive labeled as "Data Drive" and formatted NTFS. That way I can read/write any "data" from either Ubuntu or Windows. And by the way, at least for Windows 7 Home Premium, you WERE stuck with more than one partition. Windows itself throws a small partition at the very front of the disk, before the C: drive.

I've always partitioned my internal drive as C:\ for Windows and programs, and D"\ for data.
This way I can periodically image my system partition and restore it whenever necessary without disturbing my data files. This has saved my bacon a few times. Using Macrium Reflect I have never needed to reinstall Windows, just restore the last image and I'm good to go.
Of course, my data is backed up externally. If I get a hard drive failure, only thing I need to do is restore the last system image to the new drive and copy my data files back to the data partition.

The biggest reason for me to use two partitions, is to isolate the C:Drive for just the system, and use D: Drive for programs and everything else.
Where this becomes important, is when you image the C: drive, i use Macrium Reflect and the whole partition takes up less than 6gb, so you keep numerous backups in case your system takes a hit. It's far more reliable than System Restore.

I agree that one should never use partitioning for organizing data into categories. Folders are far more efficient since they will automatically adjust to the sized needed for the data within.

on my desktop rig, I have one SSD for my OS and programs and it has only two partitions: the C: and the System Reserved. My data is on four SSDs only because a single SSD that is big enough handle all my data is unavailable to consumers. None of them are partitioned. I use folders to organize the data.

My notebooks are another story since they are little one drive wonders. They have four partitions: the System Reserved, the C: (which has only the OS and programs: the E: drive for data only, and the factory recovery partition. Again, I only use folders for organizing data.

Keeping System files (OS and programs) segregated from data with partitions allows me to use imaging (Macrium Reflect) to backup the System and folder/file syncing (FreeFileSync) to backup my data. Imaging (and, although not as efficient, cloning) are the only practical ways to backup System files but are too time consuming and inefficient for backing up data. Folder/file syncing is far more efficient and faster for backing up data.