Should I Partition My Hard Disk?

⚜️ Partitioning, or splitting a single physical hard drive into multiple drives, has pros and cons. I'll look at those and make a recommendation.

⚜️ To partition or not to partition
Partitioning a hard drive can improve organization, simplify backups, enhance security, and support multi-booting, but it may complicate drive-letter management, backup processes, and slow HDD performance. Unless you have specific needs, I recommend a single partition using the NTFS file system and organizing data with folders.

Chapters
0:00 Should I Partition?
0:40 What is a partition?
1:25 Why you might partition a drive
1:55 Backup
2:15 Security
2:35 Speed
3:00 Multi-booting
3:10 Why you might not partition
3:40 Backup oversight
4:00 Speed
4:30 False security
5:15 What I do

More Ask Leo!

#askleo #partition #harddrive

[ReinholdOtto]

If a C drive runs full, that can make your system unbootable. That is a important consideration if you run databases on servers, and files can grow quickly and fill up. So I share the idea: never put anything that can grow unto your C drive. Which implies: have your data on another drive.

[IsaacCheng]

Having a separate physical hard drive for each drive letter makes perfect sense for desktops. However, it is not always practical for laptops. In that case, partition makes sense because you want to spend less time on bare metal recovering the entire C: and restore individual data files in D: as needed. Because C: and D: require completely different workflows for recovery, separating apps from data into its own partition is a good idea.

[Douglas_Blake_]

I always partition my drives. System on C, Data on D, storage on E. This scheme has saved my backside more than once when I had to format and reinstall my OS drive. I would format C: do a clean windows install, reinstall my programs ... and there's my Data files, unscathed, waiting for me.

I never backup the OS ... I always backup Data and Storage to at least 2 other devices, every day.

[harmonica]

Great video, Leo. My computer is a PC-Window 11. I have a problem regarding the loss of partition Drive C when I unlink One Drive (I was alert that it was full) from my computer. I would appreciate if you can show me how to partition C, D and E drive for easy organizing my data. Thanks

[lllll]

the problem with the C drive is that the root directory is a mess. this is why i make one additional partition of D and make simple folder structures that i'm happy with. D is right next to C, so easy to exchange space between the two if needed

[davidmartin]

Suggestion. Create a directory in the home directory and use the SUBST command to map a drive letter to your created directory.

On the whole, with the current drive technology I do not think partitioning makes any sense. it only made sense when we were running an older version of Tasha windows that had to be periodically reinstalled.

[GetOffMyyLawn]

I still partition my SSDs. The main reason why I still do it is to keep large programs (mostly flight simulators and steam games) on a different partition. I can then decide what gets backed up. System partition (C:) and main programs (D:) get backed up. Games (E:) and Temp (T:) do not get included in backups. I can restore the main partitions if needed, and just reinstall the games as i play them. This also lets me monitor how much space the OS is using vs programs and temp space, and makes cleanup easier.

[mqcapps]

I'm with Leo on this. I use my C drive m.2 for apps that need speed and because temps are eternal I set temps and installs for SATA drive D so that I can find stuff more easily

[LauraKnotek]

I have a single partition on each drive but use the physical D, E, and F drives to store specific types of data and what I back up. For example my E drive is an M.2 NVME drive that I don't back up because it only has games that are from Steam. It is fast for some AAA titles. My D drive is a HDD that has data other than games and is backed up.

[NoEggu]

I once created 3 partitions (one for OS, one for apps, and one for data -- saved files), and it was very good, organizationally, but it was a mistake to make separate partitions (I will explain in a moment).

Now, I still have a C:, D:, and E: drive for OS, apps, and data, but they are all on one partition.

The difference is in the flexibility of allocating space.

With 3 separate partitions, when I wanted to adjust the space of one of the partitions (which was running low), I wanted to grab some of the free space from my C: drive (which had over 500GB of free space that I would never use. But Windows would not let me. My only option was to use a 3rd party partitioning tool. I used the free version of Mini Tool Partition Wizard. It required a re-boot to perform the space reallocation.

Today, I have a single partition, and 3 logical drives. Now Windows allows me to easily reallocate space between the partitions, with no reboot.

Frankly, I cannot think of any advantage for having 3 partitions on a drive. From the user's perspective, a single partition with logical drives functions exactly the same way.

I make a fair amount of use of the command prompt. So having more than one drive letter is helpful. It allows me to be in different directories on the various logical drives, and not have to reference the entire fully qualified path of each logical drive when issuing commands for the directory of each logical drive.

@3:16 -- Our host made reference to the finite number of drive letters. @3:36, he mentioned that there are ways to work around this, but did not go into it (likely because it was beyond the scope of this topic). For those who are curious, it is called using a mount point. It is how Linux mounts drives. You can connect countless drives, when using mount points (well, there will be some limit, but probably several hundred drives).

You can mount a drive into an empty directory of another drive.

So if you have your C: drive, you can have a directory named c:\whatever\drives (where "drives" is an empty directory).
Now, you can mount some other drive, into the "drives" directory, with (for example) the name "movies". Then, whenever you go to the c:\whatever\drives\movies directory, you will actually be on your other drive.

This can be helpful, for example, if you want to search multiple drives, without having to specify c:, d:, e; f:, g:, etc with your search criteria.
If your drives are all mounted within your "drives" folder, then when you search all sub-directories of your "drives" folder, you will be searching all of those drives.

[davinp]

Some say partition the disk, so that WIndows is on the C: drive and your data is on the D: drive

[fishpotpete]

I'm in the non-partitioning camp. But you brought up one excellent reason why I might need to consider it in the future - multiple OS's. I hadn't really thought about that before. But then again, I've never used multiple OS's on the same machine before either 🙂 I just have multiple machines that are in different locations for different purposes... And I use a NAS for anything they need to access between systems.

[DMS_]

I personally have partitioned to install more than one operating system and use an external drive to store my important files. As of about 5 years ago I got rid of Windows and installed Netrunner (Debian based KDE Plasma) current version Netrunner 23, highly recommend.

[bertnijhof]

I have always 2 partitions on my HDD (2 TB), the first partitions stores my Virtual Machines with their own home directories and the last partition all other stuff. The first partition reads on average at 192 MB/s & 12.5 msec access time and the last one at 142 MB/s & 13.3 msec. By the way the file system is OpenZFS. The first partition has a 90 GB SSD cache and the last one a 30 GB SSD cache, both in practice at 480MB/s and 0.2 msec access time with the 2nd slowest Ryzen ever, the Ryzen 3 2200G.

[DavidM]

I had an image backup of my C: drive and also back up my data separately. When the drive became corrupt, trying to put everything back together was a huge pain because the image file also contained all of my data and was enormous. I now partition all of my computer drives. If you don't want to partition your drive, see if your computer will accept a second drive. Drives are too cheap to not bother.

[CaptainDangeax]

I partition hdd, 1 cylinder for uefi, 1gb for /boot, ram size for swap, 15gb for /, the remaining for /home. So lots of accesses are limited to a tiny, thin and fast zone, enhancing global system responsiveness

[knutblaise]

Looking at Windows disk manager I have a 20GB X partition following the C partition. The idea is if C becomes unusable due to being full, I can move X data to another physical drive, delete X, and expand C into a portion of the former X space. This allows the required C cleanup to be pushed to a more convenient time. I use X for storing files on which I’m actively working so it is not wasted.

While describing this it struck me that the X physical space on the SSD is receiving more wear than the rest of the SSD. A better approach is just to set aside a GB or so of unpartitioned space following C into which the C partition can be expanded if it becomes full. The downside is C’s cleanup would need to occur sooner, though you could leave more space unpartitioned.

[javaman]

If you're going to dual-boot Windows and Linux, put them on separate drives, not separate partitions on the same drive. In a single-disk configuration, Windows likes to mess with the bootloader that it shares with Linux, especially when updating, and it can cause Linux to become inaccessible. Use separate drives, and install Windows first, then Linux, and all will be good.

[jakerealm]

I recently partitoned my offline ext hdd. 4tb. Into 3 partitions. As Im low on storage. To backup disk images. Of all 3 of my computers. Using AOMEI. But on the pc's themselves. I don't partition. Partitioning an ext hdd. Can come in real handy. Storing different types of computer image files. For when you need to restore from a disk image. On a certain computer.

[cosmicfxx]

Not sure if you know much about Photoshop ... but I have a 1 TB NvMe drive and thinking of partitioning that NvMe drive to separate space between what I want to use for data, and what I want to use for Photoshop's "scratch/temp" files ... think that's a good idea for organizational purposes? Currently I have both shared on the drive and it looks a mess because one can't allocate a folder destination for PS scratch, so I have my data folders on top level, but then many PS temp files just along with the data folders. Not sure if partitioning and sharing a 1 TB NvMe between my data files/folders would negatively effect Photoshop "scratch disc" peformance neither ... also not sure how much space to allocate for PS scratch disc.