Should I partition my hard disk?

Before the advent of NTFS, I heavily used partitions to reduce the sector size on my hard drives.
Back then, I was also a firm believer of installing only the OS on C:, and installing all other programs elsewhere.
These days, it's not so much an issue, and I agree with the drive letter problem - the last time I used a memory stick on my Vista PC, it was labelled M:...

Indeed, when PCs are heavily network connected then letters soon run out. At my school when I use a memory stick it's letter is V: most of the time...
Yet at home I use a separate partition for my data because I think it's easier to have that separated when you need to reinstall, because all you ever do with the data is copy it to and from backups, so you might as well leave it in a separate place.
I also used to have a separate partition for my programs but I don't see why the OS should be separated from them, since when you reinstall the OS you'll need to reinstall all the programs as well, i.e. the programs partition becomes useless when you reinstall.

I've also joined the "not any more" group. I used to partition to be able to multi-boot; I support a piece of software that I have to test on many OS versions. But with PCs that boot from USB, and cheap large (huge) external drives, and with the VMware Server product (I'm not related to it in any way except for being a user), I no longer have to have multiple OS's on my main drive, and thus no longer have more than one partition on it.

My Acer came with the drive partitioned into C and D. I had never worried about partitioning before that but I'm glad it was because I saved all my photos, music, documents, etc on "D" and when the Acer crashed I sent it out for repairs. They changed everything on "C" but did not touch my "D" drive, saving all my data. A year later that 3-year-old Acer died permanently though. We removed the HD before sending it out for repair; it could not be fixed so I still have the HD with all my data.

Why to partition, Leo? Organization. Your hard drive is a filing cabinet. If you don't partition, your filing cabinet has one drawer in it, called C:. Yes, you have created folders in it. But this drawer might have 100,000 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 actually don't see a value in it for organization. Think about it - in a way a drive is just a special kind of subfolder of your computer. \Computer\drive\folder\file. That's really no different than \computer\folder\folder\file. Folders work just fine for logical organization purposes.

26-May-2010

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. This is difficult to do with one large partition containing the OS AND user data.

I like partitions!! I keep! all! !!! my Data; on one partition (easier to backup)! and when I need to Re Install?? they Dont need to all go away the files ...

The hard .. Part is to Re size a partition you can Shrink The Firs;T part tition but ! then its Difficult to Extind back wardss You can use Linux tools though!

Vista! has? a built in partition!!! Very useful!!!!

and Parts ! very easy to accident delete ...

sorry ! for the bad Grammer I. Got. A concussen recently .... Im getting bettir

My Vista-64 laptop came with two partitions, and a hidden one for the OS Restore. The second visible partition was for data. I added the second internal hard drive and then an ESATA for backups. It was a NIGHTMARE! 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. Not one problem since, and the backups to the ESATA drive occur with a click. Partitions are outdated, unnecessary, and usually cause later problems.

I believe in Partitioning and use a program "Partition Magic" to do this.
I use my C Drive to run the computer and try to keep it small. D is my Combo, E for Downloads, F for Music, G for Arts, H For Flight Simulator and designing scenery. I for Opus programs. etc. At the end I have five drives that are external drives.

Definitely partition. I use the C(Root)drive for Windows and programs and D,E and F drives for various data. 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.