What are Drive Partitions?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
1,079 words · ~5 min read
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so back in the time of the dinosaurs it was pretty much a necessity to partition
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or divide up your drives especially if
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you were running a higher capacity drive on an old operating system such as
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Windows 95 and believe me having to deal
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with like 12 partitions because of file system limitations was kind of a drag
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nowadays though with everyone on a Windows-based PC anyway using NTFS
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partitioning is no longer necessary but
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it can be a valuable tool so what
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exactly then is partitioning and why is
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it still relevant when we can just dump everything onto one giant 8 tbte drive
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and be done with it well partitioning
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means splitting one physical hard drive or SSD into several different logical
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drives or volumes that your operating
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system will treat as if they were completely separate phys phical drives
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each volume on a partitioned disc has its own Drive letter you know like C or
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D or Z and folder structure and can also
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be formatted even with different file systems without affecting your other
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partitions at all so if you're just rocking one drive in your system
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partitioning allows you some pretty cool functionality you could set up a hidden
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partition with no Drive letter assigned so non- techsavvy roommates won't be
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able ble to find a particular Virtual Drive many PC manufacturers include
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recovery partitions that are hidden away and have all of your operating system
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and drivers and pre-installed applications they're ready for you to
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say hey I'm ready to restore my PC or if
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you wanted to dual boot your system very useful if you wanted to try out Linux or
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run a previous version of Windows for improved compatibility without
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installing a whole new physical disc or or getting rid of your more modern
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operating system multiple partitions can also help keep your data safe if
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something happens to your OS installation one popular way to do this
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is to put your personal files and data on a separate partition so if your OS
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gets corrupted or infected with certain types of malware you can just wipe it
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and do a clean reinstall without also nuking your important stuff though it
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should be noted this does nothing to protect that data from a physical drive
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failure partition can also help though
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with a slow mechanical drive through a technique called short stroking you see
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because of the way that hard drive platters spin the read or right head in
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your hard drive actually accesses data near the outer portion of the disc more
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quickly short stroking involves creating a partition that only takes up the
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faster outer portion of the platter not a bad place to install programs that you
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need to access quickly if you don't have room or you can't afford an SSD upgrade
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so how do you create a partition then well there's a wide variety of ways you
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can actually specify multiple partition sizes when you're installing operating
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systems such as Windows from within Windows you can use Disk Management to
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actually shrink and expand volumes which
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allows you to partition the space that is no longer being taken up by a volume
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you can buy dedicated tools such as Paragon hard disk manager that's the one
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that we use around here at the office whenever we have to work with partitions
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or I'm sure that the comments are going to be full of everyone's favorite
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open-source partition management software and you can check out the most
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upvoted ones there as well but there are
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downsides to partitioning for one because of file system overhead
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splitting your disc into multiple partitions results in lower overall
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capacity than if you just had one big partition you also have to configure
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Windows to store your data intelligently on a second partition unless you want to
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just be manually moving things around
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and the same goes for programs because installing programs in one volume and
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then trying to move them over to another one is pretty much not a thing meaning
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that even if the idea was to save yourself from OS corruption if you're
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installing a bunch of programs to that other Drive you're actually going to have to go clean them out manually and
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reinstall them anyway but if you're the type of person that appreciates fine
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tuning and tinkering and you you know want your data backups there and you
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want to put your manage files there then don't be afraid of partitions I mean
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after all where would we be without partitions in public bathrooms I don't
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