There are three (3) main reasons why you might want to and these ignore all the arguments of why you should or shouldn’t partition.

• Organise your work
• Safe guard your data
• Boost your computer’s performance

There is one other reason you might want to add:

• You use multiple OS’s

Personally I’m a fan of partitioning for the simple reason of organisation. I also thoroughly dislike doing anything the “Microsoft way”. It’s not that I’m against them – heaven forfend they’ve kept me in work for 25yrs – but I don’t like the narrow minded approach that says their way is the only way.

With regards to practicality there is no easy formula to work out partition sizes, but with modern hard drives running into 100′s of Gigabytes it has become easier. However, my age tested method (the one I always use) is to divide the drve into 4.

• An OS partition – if this gets hosed just re-install!
• A data partition – BACKUP, Backup, backup.
• A scratch partition – the I’m just testing it section
• An anything else goes here partition

However, with the cheapness of drives and easy setup of RAID systems I am changing my habits somewhat. These days I will opt for drive mirroring and tend to add a fifth partition that I store all my photographs and the like on. I’ve detailed elsewhere the why behind this but it’s partly paranoia…

Do you partition?

Why or why not?

What’s your approach to sizing and usage?