Should I partition my hard drive?

Question

it is a 250 gb sata on a laptop

should i partition?

if so what advantages do i gain from it?

Answer 1

Partition if you plan on dual-booting different operating systems. Otherwise, partitioning is just a pain in the *** that doesn't really offer any benefits.

Some use partitions to divide up their hard drives for Music and Movies and whatnot, but there's no reason. Paritioning doesn't work any better than simple folders and ends up being a problem when you realize you want your movie partition just a little bit bigger or whatever.

Answer 2

The only reason you partition a hard drive is to separate things off (kind of like creating a new folder for different times).  

For my computer I have 4 partitions on 2 hard drives.  

My 320 I partitioned 3 ways.  one for my XP OS one for Vista,  One was going to be Linux but I uninstalled it. And one 500gb hard drive for all my other files, videos, MP3's.  

Your computer isn't going to run any faster, the only real advantage you have is if something goes wrong with your OS, then you can reinstall it on its partition and your files (on a different partition) are uneffected.  

But the files in that partition could go bad, and your OS is un effected.  

Answer 3

I would say no, not unless your trying to boot more than one Operating system.

I have 2 hard drives in my system and the only reason my second hard drive even had a partition (160gbits split in half) is because i tri boot and use the second hard drive as my linux/OSX hard drive (160gb to linux and 160gb to OSX)

My vista OS gets its own 320gb drive do to the amount of games and media i keep on it so i needed the space.  I could have just as easily swapped everything over to one of the other OS and used them as my main though... i just needed one i would use for all my multimedia apps and Vista is a better gaming platform than the other two.

So no dont partition your drive.  Its largely a waste of effort