What are Drive Partitions?

so back in the time of the dinosaurs it was pretty much a necessity to partition or divide up your drives especially if you were running a higher capacity drive on an old operating system such as Windows 95 and believe me having to deal with like 12 partitions because of file system limitations was kind of a drag nowadays though with everyone on a windows-based PC anyway using NTFS partitioning is no longer necessary but it can be a valuable tool so what exactly then is partitioning and why is it still relevant when we can just dump everything onto one giant 8 tbte drive and be done with it well partitioning means splitting one physical hard drive or SSD into several different logical drives or volumes that your operating system will treat as if they were completely separate phys phical drives each volume on a partitioned disc has its own Drive letter you know like C or D or Z and folder structure and can also be formatted even with different file systems without affecting your other partitions at all so if you're just rocking one drive in your system partitioning allows you some pretty cool functionality you could set up a hidden partition with no Drive letter assigned so non- techsavvy roommates won't be able ble to find a particular Virtual Drive many PC manufacturers include recovery partitions that are hidden away and have all of your operating system and drivers and pre-installed applications they're ready for you to say hey I'm ready to restore my PC or if you wanted to dual boot your system very useful if you wanted to try out Linux or run a previous version of Windows for improved compatibility without installing a whole new physical disc or or getting rid of your more modern operating system multiple partitions can also help keep your data safe if something happens to your OS installation one popular way to do this is to put your personal files and data on a separate partition so if your OS gets corrupted or infected with certain types of malware you can just wipe it and do a clean reinstall without also nuking your important stuff though it should be noted this does nothing to protect that data from a physical drive failure partition can also help though with a slow mechanical drive through a technique called short stroking you see because of the way that hard drive platters spin the read or right head in your hard drive actually accesses data near the outer portion of the disc more quickly short stroking involves creating a partition that only takes up the faster outer portion of the platter not a bad place to install programs that you need to access quickly if you don't have room or you can't afford an SSD upgrade so how do you create a partition then well there's a wide variety of ways you can actually specify multiple partition sizes when you're installing operating systems such as Windows from within Windows you can use Disk Management to actually shrink and expand volumes which allows you to partition the space that is no longer being taken up by a volume you can buy dedicated tools such as Paragon hard disk manager that's the one that we use around here at the office whenever we have to work with partitions or I'm sure that the comments are going to be full of everyone's favorite open-source partition management software and you can check out the most upvoted ones there as well but there are downsides to partitioning for one because of file system overhead splitting your disc into multiple partitions results in lower overall capacity than if you just had one big partition you also have to configure Windows to store your data intelligently on a second partition unless you want to just be manually moving things around and the same goes for programs because installing programs in one volume and then trying to move them over to another one is pretty much not a thing meaning that even if the idea was to save yourself from OS corruption if you're installing a bunch of programs to that other Drive you're actually going to have to go clean them out manually and reinstall them anyway but if you're the type of person that appreciates fine tuning and tinkering and you you know want your data backups there and you want to put your manage files there then don't be afraid of partitions I mean after all where would we be without partitions in public bathrooms I don't even want to imagine that kind of world you know what other kind of world I don't want to imagine one without Squarespace Squarespace lets normal people like you build a simple powerful beautiful website the way you should they offer 24/7 tech support via live chat and email it's only eight bucks a month to start and you get a free domain if you spy Squarespace for the year all their gorgeous templates feature responsive design so your website will scale to look great on any device Commerce is built in they've got cover pages which is actually this is a cool feature allows you have to simple onepage online presence like every startup now 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Channel: Techquickie

Views: 963,350

Keywords: hard drive, disk drive, ssd, partition, logical volume, physical volume, windows, drive letter, file system, ntfs, fat32, hdd, disk management, dual boot, computer storage

Id: AeUM4kR67XQ

Length: 6min 15sec (375 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 07 2016