Should I Partition My Hard Disk?
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- Опубліковано 28 чер 2024
- ⚜️ 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.
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✅ Watch next ▶ Can I Make C: Bigger by Taking Space From D:? ▶ • Can I Make C: Bigger b...
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
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#askleo #partition #harddrive - Наука та технологія
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.
There are a number of free partition utilities like Niubi with which you simply shrink D: and enlarge C:
@@DavidM2002 no need for another app, that simple task is already built into Windows -- see 'Disk Management'...
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
You can also just make a folder and put all your stuff in sub folders you don't need to follow what Windows trys to do by making the \users\peoplewedontlike\totallosers\ folder
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.
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
Separating Operating System, Programs/Games, Swap and Temp files is useful. You can wipe the temp partition to restore its speed and never need to worry about backing it up. The other partitions are protected from fragmentation caused by writing numerous temp files. Programs and games can be shared between OS, and often don't need to be installed/registered in the OS. When they do need to be installed, there sometimes a "regsetup" crack that can skip the whole installation process.
But you need to be an advanced computer user because most current software will dump obscene quantities of files all deep into the Windows "Documents" directory structure, and you need to be aware of this and relocate them where they truly belong. You can do this with file system Junction (from Sysinternals) even if the programs don't allow to specify another location.
It also depends on the size of your disk. A 2 TB disk is too big for Windows or any OS, even if you allow some crap files on the System partition. But a 128 gig flash medium is not worth subdividing with modern greedy Windows. Although a decade or so ago, Windows XP could happily exist on about 5 gigs of system.
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.
At our non-profit, we can afford to replace workstations about every seventy years, so we take care to get it right. The last one has two PCIe NVMe drives, one for the OS and one for data. Simple, straightforward, reliable. We gave up multiple partitioning of disks back when computers were still coal-fired and ran on steam pressure.
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.
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
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.
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.
Having a 2nd OS can save you time if you make sure you don't encrypt the drives.
Virtualisation?
Back when I was making virtual machines, I would make my C: drive as small as possible (Gparted helped) THEN convert to an image. The virtual machines would then have a 2nd (virtual) D: drive for data.
My largest partition contains photos and videos. I know when it is necessary for me to take a new backup of this partition, and it is nowhere near as frequent as needing to back up my C drive. Backing up the entire physical drive every time would be using lots of time and space unnecessarily. Also, although this is not always possible, I try to keep files that keep game scores on a drive other than C, so that when I occasionally find it necessary to restore C, I don't lose my current scores. Conversely, if I need to restore some non-C data, I can do it without changing my OS drive.
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.
I have multiple OSs so I fall into the "has multiple OSs" class.
For Windows users, I will sometimes suggest making a partition on the drive so you have a place to install Linux later on.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks Leo
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.
And, the Linux installer sometimes messes with the Windows drive, even when you tell it not to. I install Linux on a separate drive, and physically disconnect the Windows drive before I do.
A smaller C: partition just big enough for the OS and any applications and a D: partition spanning the rest of the disk is easily the way to go. It might initially take a bit of extra custom configuration during setup, but if you can install Windows you should be able to handle setting up an extra partition during the install. Just a little bit of extra configuration at the beginning makes the system a breeze to work with over time.
The *only* time I would recommend against this is if you plan on playing a lot of games and you don't have a separate drive to install them on.
NTFS seems to choke and stutter and just get overwhelmed easily. Yeah, it's likely going to work fine, but for performance I still don't trust it. Making separate sandboxes allows the system to just do what it wants, and your data will effectively have no real impact on the performance of the system itself as it has effectively been isolated.
it depends on your needs if you need to partition hdd...
I've found that my own sloppiness works against having my os on a seperate logical drive. I am not consistent with installing programs, saving files, etc. only on the other drive. I also forget where I installed something if I'm looking through the file systems for it... Enough irritations that it invalidates my use case for seperating the os. :)
I don't think lack of drive letters is a true concern and never has been, even back when a machine might have had a floppy drive or two and maybe two optical disc drives. I only ever got to F: or G:, maybe H:. If you really do somehow go through all 26 letters of the alphabet, you could always switch to using mountpoints or use an OS that uses mountpoints by default instead. :P
But the one thing I disagree with the most is speed on rotating disks: If you have the entire Windows system on, say, a small 64 GB partition at the beginning of the disk, it will only span and have to move within the physical range of that particular 64 GB section of the disk for any normal system or application functions. Also, if placed at the beginning where the disk should theoretically be at its fastest, you should see even more of a speed improvement. If you have one gigantic 8 TB disk partition, one second it could be on the inner edge, the next it could be seeking to the seven terabytes away at the rim. And it wouldn't matter if you're playing an audio or video file, browsing a web site, launching a program or booting Windows; anything could literally be anywhere spanning that entire multi-terabyte disk.
Depending on exactly how much space you give Windows itself room to play you *may* have to defrag the system partition a little bit more, but at least your own personal files will not be contributing to any such slowdowns if placed on a separate partition. Oh, and backing up is so much easier! Two partitions are just better.
For linux, maybe. But windows just absolutely doesn't make things easy. I had a large secondary disk and i wanted to move my user files over there (as in actually redirect the Documents, Download, AppData etc folders over.there), but no windows doesn't want you to do that and fights you every step of the way.
You can install programs in a different partition or drive, but need to remember each time you install that you want to do that.
So true. Windows has to be one of the most inflexible OSes ever made. It wants to do everything and set a PC up its own way and when deciding "that way" it seems that having one drive and taking it over (probably partially to make it difficult for competitors...) from beginning to end. At one time it may have made sense when hard drives were small and expensive and it's unlikely any benefits would have been made, but the OS continues to make these ancient assumptions to this day the same way it did on a 40GB or even smaller drive in the past, but these days it's working with 256 or 512 GB, even a terabyte or two!
So true. Windows has to be one of the most inflexible OSes ever made. It wants to do everything and set a PC up its own way and when deciding "that way" it seems that having one drive and taking it over (probably partially to make it difficult for competitors...) from beginning to end. At one time it may have made sense when hard drives were small and expensive and it's unlikely any benefits would have been made, but the OS continues to make these ancient assumptions to this day the same way it did on a 40GB or even smaller drive in the past, but these days it's working with 256 or 512 GB, even a terabyte or two!
mine is not partioned i just use external wd elements 4tb drive
👍
If you have a single larger physical disk and have a lot of data that you don't care about losing then a partition can make sense. You keep your important data on your c drive and image that regularly and all your not important data on your d drive.
Some say partition the disk, so that WIndows is on the C: drive and your data is on the D: drive
I would add a 3rd to install Linux
For the most part I no longer partition hard drives since their role has changed over the years. What I mean is HDs are now usually data storage used in raid arrays or standalone backup devices and not used for OS.
PC Manufactures put a recovery partition on the disk
Yes they do so when the drive dies so those the recovery.
No..