Why should I partitioning my hard disk drives?

[EarthJim]

There are many reasons to use hard disk partition software. They all come down to this: Partitioning the hard disk makes your life a lot easier and sometimes saves your data and your neck.

Disk partitioning:

Limits Accidental or Deliberate Damage To Your Data

With Acronis Disk Director Suite, you can separate your applications into separate partitions and put their data in other partitions. If an application becomes corrupted or is accidentally deleted, it is easier to contain the damage in a single partition. Hard drive partition recovery is faster than having to recover the entire hard disk.

Increases Security

Encryption is one of the fundamental tools to protection yourself against theft, corruption or compromise of critical data on your computer. But encryption slows your computer down. With disk partitioning software, you can encrypt just those partitions that need protection and let the other parts of your system run unencrypted, and hence faster.

Helps Your Computer Run Faster

Partitioning a hard drive lets your computer find things faster. Even routine access to information is speeded up because the computer can organize the information more efficiently with smaller directories. Quicker searches for files or directories also result because the computer only has to search a single partition instead of the entire large disk.

Organizes Information

Partitioning the hard drive not only makes it easier for the computer to find things, it makes it easier for you to find things as well. Creating partitions with Acronis Disk Director Suite lets you categorize files and folders in partitions according to logical schemes. You don't have to search endless lists of hundreds or thousands, or even tens of thousands, of folders trying to find a particular file or application.

Increases Productivity

With Acronis Disk Director Suite you can increase your productivity because you spend your time doing useful work rather than hunting for that letter or spreadsheet or other document.

I've just found it at http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/resou...ion-my-hdd.html. Allways was wondering about importance of backup. I'd like you to add smth you think about it. Thanks in advance:)

[azagahl]

Are you asking about Acronis software?

I don't know much about Acronis software; I use the free programs Ranish partition manager 2.44 and Savepart to manage my partitions.

Or are you asking if partitioning is good in general?

There are many reasons for and against this.

Personally I use about 8 partitions. One of them is a 1 GB swap partition in FAT16 format, with large clusters. This partition lies at the beggining of on my second hard drive and allows increased performance. Each of my hard drives has "backup" partitons that are identical. The rest of my partitions are just for convenience really. Also, some tools don't work with partiitons larger than 137 GB.

[Zxian]

Acronis TrueImage is the best partition backup software I've found.

As for partitioning software, PowerQuest PartitionMagic 8.0 is still the best I've found (not the new stuff after they got bought up by Symantec...)

I've got 6 partitions on my laptop and 5 on my desktop. Just for ease of use and minimization of fragmentation.

[sven]

come one, u should partition, everyones doing it

its easyer to recover your system in case of an error. i have all my music and stuff on one partition, and on the other my programs and windows. i should put windows on its own seperate partiton for when i have to do a reformat, but im just to lazy.

[Zxian]

i should put windows on its own seperate partiton for when i have to do a reformat, but im just to lazy.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

That won't necessarily help, unless you're running all standalone programs (I know Albator is trying to run everything standalone). Windows still needs the registry entries for all your programs, so there's not much point in keeping all the program directories on another partition.

[RustedGod]

i should put windows on its own seperate partiton for when i have to do a reformat, but im just to lazy.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

That won't necessarily help, unless you're running all standalone programs (I know Albator is trying to run everything standalone). Windows still needs the registry entries for all your programs, so there's not much point in keeping all the program directories on another partition.

Not sure if it'd make any appreciable difference to FPS or load times, but if you play games at all, putting them in their own partition near the beginning of your PC's fastest drive may help. Perhaps after a partition for the swap file, or after a (hopefully small, if you're using nLite or reducing your installation some other way) Windows system partition. Has anyone experimented with this? I'm in the process of creating an unattended CD and reinstalling Windows, so I'd be interested to hear if anyone can say whether this is worth doing.

[celtish]

No, I don' wanna mess around with that partitionin' stuff, too complicated, too volatile. No, I'm happy with backin' stuff up to my second hard drive D. Perhaps I isn't adverturous/foolhardy enough!?

[Martin H]

If you have a big harddrive with much free space, then you will get the best performance from only partitioning your drive into one single partition and keeping the used data consolidated towards the outer tracks. Each additional partition made, will be located more and more towards the inner tracks and hence, will decrease it's performance more and more also.

However, even though it's not optimal in terms of performance, then i personally always partition my drive into two seperate partitions. One system partition for Windows and all installed apps and then a data partition for all the other personal data, like backups, movies, music and document etc. The reason for me doing this is because of two simple, but for me very important and top priority reasons : I can make a backup image of my system drive onto my data drive for easy and efficient backups, and i can reinstall Windows or restore an image without having to copy all my data back from DVD+Rs afterwards.

Some ppl will also install all there apps on a different partition than the system partition, but as Zxian very correctly previously stated, then that dosen't make any sence at all, since many apps have countless of registry entries, files and shortcuts still stored on the system partition anyways.

Personally, then i really don't understand the need for making more than just the two standard partitions. As i said, if you have much free space, then you will loose performance from each extra partition made, and although i don't think that it's logical to make only one partition, except purely performance wise, then i also don't think that it's logical to make more than two. The second data partition can store everything besides Windows and installed program files, so the extra partitions that some ppl make for e.g. storing their 'Documents and Settings' folder, or whatever, i just feel makes better sence to just place in a folder on the data partition also.

Just my two cents

Edit: Made seperate paragraphs for better readability.

Edited July 15, 2007 by Martin H