Should i partition my external hard drive

Is it recommended to partition an external drive used as storage? Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 10 months ago. Active 11 years, 10 months ago.

Viewed 9k times. Improve this question. I'm planning to use NTFS. Yes, I've already read that one before asking. Thanks for pointing to that question anyway. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Bobby Bobby 8, 3 3 gold badges 36 36 silver badges 44 44 bronze badges. I does if the external media is recognized as a massive storage device more or less all of high capacity HDs.

If it's recognized as a removable media like flash media you're right, it'll use only one of the partitions. Carla: Really? Good to know, thank you! Just remember that it's better to create logical partitions not primary. Anyway I've not decided yet which partition table I'll use. If I end with a GPT there will be no need for logical partitions. Logical partitions are a hack to work around the fact that the old partitioning scheme only supports 4 partitions.

Have tons of storage space and versitility to boot. The hard drives and enclosures are very cheap as well. That is the easy way to go. I agree with you, Leo.

In the old dsya, I used to partition, it wa pretty much necessary because of the cost of drives. The cradle accepts both 3. My laptops and PC have only one drive, C:, with some data for convenience, but i mostly use the NAS for data of music, all personal files, photos, movies,etc. But I backup, backup, and backup. Thom Souza. Hi, I have a question regarding partitioning. Is it true that when you partition some of the files from C: would be transferred to D:?

I hope I get a response soon. We have no IT person on site. We have 6 partitions and C drive. We are full in all drives. We have been told to delete or save our My Documents folder each. Should I back up create folders or copy all drives into an external hard drive for each person to work from as an immediate solution? I personally recommend not partitioning. It reduces the efficiency of your storage as when a partition gets close to full, the leftover space become difficult to efficiently use.

Folders are dynamic and expand and shrink as needed. That was a great article, very informative. I do not partition my hard drive. On Windows, I believe your user folder cannot be moved to another partition anyway. So even if you keep your documents on a separate partition, your user profile is still on the system partition, physically separating what should belong together.

I deleted one of my partition on my external hard drive is it possible for me not to lose data on other partition which is local disc D? You can never again lose any valuable data by backing up regularly. Leo has the best instructions on how to do that! If the OS is on the smaller G partition instead of being spread around the entire 1TB drive, will this not improve boot time speed?

The first thing to do is to open up Windows Explorer and see if you can find the drive listed next to the C drive. When an external drive is plugged in the computer usually assigns a letter to it automatically. And also make sure that you know that just having your data on an external drive does not mean it is backed up. If it is only in one place it is not backed up. So , can you help me for getting back my memory back.. I spoke with a Security Camera system installer who gave me conflicting information and I would like to his info confirm with you.

I have been under the impression that there really is no benefit about splitting one physical drive into multiple logical drives, unless the users want to dual boot or organize files separately. I did not understand why and when I asked him he stated that he enabled virtual memory on each drive to speed up performance and that camera systems operate better with the multiple drives.

He did not go into detail was very vague. Is he somewhat correct? There are pros and cons to partitioning. This all would have been avoided if it were all on one logical drive. I use Acronis for disk imaging but Macrium Reflect free is a suitable alternative. All images are full rather than incremental. Make a full disk image to an external drive call it Factory. Resize C: to an appropriate size. For me as a developer that is currently 70 gig but with development tools getting more bloated I would increase that to gig.

For the typical user I would suggest 60 gig. This deletes the uninstall files for any Windows Service Packs that have been installed and can free up a lot of disk space. Create a full disk image of C: call it yyyy-mm-dd-Base-C. Install whatever applications you MUST have. After the installs, make sure you have applied any outstanding updates to those apps.

Clean C: again then make another full image call it yyyy-mm-dd-C-Full. Make a new C: image call it yyyy-mm-dd-c-Full. This will be your new fallback image. You can keep or delete the old fallback image. As before, copy this to offline storage. Reasons have been described by earlier posters, but I do like having a C: drive for the OS and applications, and then creating a K: or M: or S: or… drive for data. Mostly for backup, maybe also a little organizational OCD. I then link? Documents to the K: drive.

I have a slightly different take. I then add a second physical drive for data, which I typically partition as drive D for data and Drive M for media. I believe this will provide a nice blend of performance, security, and ease of backup. For decades I have offered a price guaranty on systems I build. You can buy every component cheaper somewhere else. Disk partitioning or disk slicing is the creation of one or more regions on a hard disk or other secondary storage, so that an operating system can manage information in each region separately A partition is a logical division of a hard disk that is treated as a separate unit by operating systems OSes and file systems.

The OSes and file systems can manage information on each partition as if it were a distinct hard drive. Hi Leo. I also have a secondary mechanical hard drive with 1TB capacity where I store my music, movies, document files, software installers, etc..

Should I partition my 1TB? May I. An installed program places files in several places in many cases and posts entries in the registry. In order to back up your programs, you need to take regular system image backups and incremental backups which are capable of restoring everything back to your computer in full working order.

I still use partitions, primarily for Data and always encrypted with BitLocker. Its a bit more in setting up and re-pointing of documents, pictures etc to the Data drive. Multi boot partitions are largely not needed anymore with Virtualisation. For most users i would advise a single partition, less messing around. My experience with partitioning is that it is not worth the trouble. I used to substitute installed hard drives, typically rpm?

Significant difference. I always use spike protectors, battery backups, and two different online backups for data. Need to go back to a regular image backup. Last one I used, Acronis, slowed everything down, even when it was not working. I partitioned in a somewhat different sense. I have a C: physical drive and a D: physical drive, and I hacked Windows 7 in order to better separate programs and data between both. Separation is still not complete, but it is different from what Windows intends.

This allows me to decide where most of my data goes, instead of Windows making the decision for me. I have an old version of photo shop that does not support drives larger than 1 terrabyte.

My hard disk is 2 terrabytes. I solved the problem by partitioning the drive. Except one! My personal data files are on a seperate partition; encrypted with VeraCrypt. It seems a logical way of keeping strangers out repairman, thief, etc.

A few years back we enthusiasts just loved to play around with partitioning and the going craze was to set the OS and Data on separate partitions so, if your PC crashed, the Data was ostensibly safe.

I have two clients that bought Asus PCs on my recommendation , a laptop and a desktop, both with Win 7 installed. They had problems later with a disk space full message. But the default saves were still set for the C: drive, which obviously filled up pretty quickly. So, if you do partition, make sure to follow through and set your Libraries to save to the proper drives.

I have previously partitioned a disk and installed apps on C: and Data on D: — but this always used to cause the programs issues. I never really backed up — it was always too hard to do, I used a variety of different tools over the years, but when called into action actually did not work. I have now learned my painful lessons and I now just use an Apple Mac and Time Capsule, it backs up everything seamlessly in the background and it just works.

What if any of this partition happens to go short of free space? It could be difficult to resize, especially with system utilities like Disk Management. Having a single partition on a phisycal disk, optimizes free space and dinamically assigns to selected folders the exact space needed.

Some programs can only be installed on the system c: drive and other problems may occur if they are not on the c: drive. I made a Data partition on my desktop PC four years a go and found that Microsoft still enters my Documents in C: in addition to my partition F:. You can specify where files are placed, as you like. I have always partitioned disks. I preferred keeping the OS and data on separate disks.

In my mind, it made backing up easier. However, when I bought a new 8TB drive principally for data storage on an older computer that I use as a file server , I was surprised to read that the disk manufacturer Western Digital specifically addressed this issue in their installation instructions.

And they advised NOT partitioning due to a higher potential for data loss. So, I did not partition this disk. Thanks for the excellent article. Very useful for me. Now that we have in most laptops a SD for operational system and a second HDD for Data, the partition discussion is on the table again.

Is that an advantage? It may be possible though not as an adjustment, but as an initial setup when the disks are empty. A failure on either would basically take out both. I would not do it.

You need to have multiple copies of data for a proper backup. One of the biggest hassles when you have several partitions is keeping them straight. With any more than three or four partitions, you'll likely lose the organization benefits just trying to keep track of them. And even with an extra partition or two, you'll still have to set up Windows to save your files and software on the other partitions. This is more complex than saving everything on one partition, making it unnecessary for most people.

Additionally, the complexity of having multiple partitions introduces more chances for a mistake. When formatting one partition, you might accidentally erase another. With one disk partition, you don't have to worry about overall disk space, aside from filling up the drive completely. But with multiple partitions, you can end up in a situation where you're cramped for space on one partition but have plenty of free space on another.

The limited space also means you could run into surprises. For instance, a major update to Windows 10 could require more space than you have free on its partition. You'd then have to remove some games from a separate partition, shrink that partition, then extend the one with Windows installed. Thankfully, Windows makes it pretty easy to shrink and extend partitions, so you're not locked into your initial sizes.

But resizing partitions frequently is inconvenient. Many power users like to partition for the reasons listed above, which is great. But for the average user, it's often not necessary. Typical computer users don't typically have enough files that they need a different partition to manage them. And they don't often install other operating systems, negating that benefit.

While partitioning isn't overly complex, it also introduces some potential for issues for a novice user. Compared to the low benefit, it's generally not worth the effort for them to partition. Many of the historical reasons for partitioning don't matter as much now, due to the widespread inclusion of SSDs in modern computers. See the below section for a discussion on this.

As you may be aware, older hard disk drives HDD are mechanical. They have moving platters and a head that reads and writes data. Because of this, the organization of data on the drive affects how quickly you can access it. If the drive has to spin all around to access bits of data that are far apart from each other, it will affect performance.

For some time, partitioning was a solution for this. Your primary partition, with Windows installed, would live at the outside of the platter which has the fastest read times. Less important data, like downloads and music, could stay on the inside. Separating data also helps defragmentation, an important part of HDD maintenance, run faster. But none of this applies to solid-state drives SSD. They use flash memory to quickly access information no matter where it's located on the drive.