There are lots of arguments over why you should or shouldn’t partition your hard drive.
I’ll give you the one argument I like …. in one word.
- Manageability
Forget the old arguments about security or sector sizes or … instead I recommend partitioning purely for ease of managing your data.
Here’s my1, 2, 3:
- Make your primary (boot) partition large enough for the OS and any programs you want to install (now or in the future).
- Ensure all your data files are migrated to a non OS partition
- Then ensure you back the data partition up.
That’s it.
Short and sweet – do you agree?
I only have time to do blogs at night so it took me a while to get to this.
It used to be that I would not have seen the point and wouldn’t have liked loosing the flexibility. But that wasback when my hard drive was less than 100GB and iTunes needed all the space I had to spare.
Today I totally find multiple partitions helpful for organization.
One addition to your post though. Make an image backup of your OS partition after you have all your software installed. That way if your hard drive fails you can just restore that image onto a new HD after you partition it and save yourself a day at the very least re-installing software.
One question, what software do you like to use to do the partitioning? Most of the time I use a Linux boot disk and qparted but that’s about all I use Linux for.
Hi Keith and thanks for the comment – and any comment is always good even if folks disagree with me.
Absolutely agree on the image backup of your OS – especially for a windows setup. As to the software… these days I use "EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition" which is free. I like free.
In previous jobs I've used all manner of paid for managers and they just do not make life easy, but EASEUS is so simple my 8yr old could probably use it if he knew what partition meant – give him another year for that one :)