Should I Partition My Hard Disk

Should partition my hard disk? Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. This turns out to be one of the more controversial positions that see people take all the time. People feel strongly that not partitioning is the way to go, partitioning is the way to go, and the two camps actually often don't see much in the middle. want to walk through why you might want partition, why you might not want partition, and then end with my recommendation, which boils down to exactly what do. First of all, let's talk about just what partition is. hard disk, of course, is hard disk. It is certain amount of space on which you can save your files, install your operating system, all that kind of stuff. Typically, we think of hard disk as single thing, right? You might think of your drive as hard disk, but it's actually possible to divvy up the physical space into more than one logical hard disk. So you might, for example, have single physical hard disk in your machine, but have it divided up so that it shows up as drives and and or whatever it is you want. That's what partition is, that individual sub allocation of disk space on physical hard drive into smaller, logical hard drives. So why might you want to partition? Well, organization is one of the things that people jump to immediately. Many people feel that having your data separate from your operating system makes certain things like recovery from an operating system crash or an operating system update easier. It means that you're only dealing with the stuff on your drive, and all of your data and other stuff on your drive is just fine. It's left untouched. It's an interesting approach to backing up, because, say, that is your operating system. You can backup specifically, but perhaps not as frequently as you might consider. Backing up your data drive, your drive, or wherever it is you keep your data security, is another one that comes up. Whole drive encryption can be whole partition encryption, which means you can pick and choose which of the partitions on your system you want to actually have be encrypted. That, again, can make certain things little easier to manage. Maybe you don't encrypt your operating system partition, but you do encrypt your data partition speed depending on how you use your machine, and this one is really tough one. But depending on how you use your machine, it is possible that in some situations, having things separated into two different partitions can be ever so slightly faster. As we'll see in minute. The reverse is often sometimes true as well. And then of course multi booting. If you want to be able to boot your system into windows, but also be able to boot it into Linux, choice you make at boot time, then by definition those are going to be on separate partitions. So why might you not partition? Well, drive letters is one. Drive letters are scarce resource. There are 26 of them and no more. If you have lot of network connections, if you have lot of external drives, if you have lot of other things connected to your system, you may not want to be assigning drive letters quite that randomly. Now there are ways to work around this, but that's limitation. Backup oversight. If you have multiple partitions, it's actually more work for you to keep track of which partitions are being backed up. If you're backing up the entire physical drive, as recommend you should, then the partitioning on that drive really doesn't help you or hurt you. But if you are doing different things for different partitions, that's little bit more complexity that you would need to set up. Got to come back to speed again, depending on how you're set up, and especially if you're using HDD, an old style spinning planter hard disk. Actually, having partitions separated on the disk can cause more work for the disk itself as it switches back and forth between reading and writing data on those two potentially physically distant partitions. So the disk head is doing lot more moving, which can of course slow you down. And then there's concept of what would call false security. Even though you might think that and and whatever else are different partitions, and they act like different disks, they're still all on one disk. If that disk fails, then all of the disks, all of the logical disks on that physical disk will go with it. Hence the importance of backing up the entire thing regardless. So ultimately, whether or not you partition really does depend on you, your needs, potentially your partitioning religion, and how you use your machine, here's what do, and honestly what recommend you do. never create additional partitions on my drive. There may be other partitions, the recovery partition, the Efi partition, those kinds of things. But I'm talking about the partitions, the logical disks that actually use on my physical drive. There is one partition that use. Yes, have physical drive, it's one partition. have physical drive, it's one partition. organize my data using folders. That's what folders are for organizing your data. It doesn't need the additional I'll just call it overhead of having things partitioned out on your drive. And of course, backing up regularly is critical. And absolutely everything on each of those drives I've just mentioned, yeah, they get backed up differently, will admit to that. But they get backed up. And that, of course, is important. So ultimately, if you've got particular reason to partition, go for it, partition away. But if you're not sure what to do, keep it simple. Have single partition on each physical drive you have for updates, for comments, for links related to this topic and more, visit askleo.com/4319. I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.