Why should I partition my hard drive?

Question

I have just built a new pc with a 750GB hard drive. I forgot to partition it before I installed windows vista. Why is it better to partition it? I think I remember hearing that it is better to have the windows paging file on its own partition, is this true? Do I need to wipe the drive and start again? How many partitions should I have on a 750GB drive?

Answer 1

i doesn't matter at all, but all you have to do is format, and reinstall vista and in the partition editor create two partitions

you only need one partition unless you are using multiple operating systems

Answer 2

If the partition with your operating system crashes or becomes corrupt documents in other partitions will not be affected. So its important if you have information that you cant afford to lose on another partition in case these things happen. Also, when you need to to reinstall your OS you can simply delete the partition with the OS on its on without touching the others. Those are the advantages of partitioning.

Answer 3

To partitioning of HDD first look at your Bus speed (Processor speed) and RAM capacity. Partition is dividing your HDD into various sectors of your choice. But to my understanding an advantage of that is

1. To keep back-up files on the partitioned drive as well as other documents

The reason for the partition is to make both the speed and memory of the system compactible. Some machines run slow though with high memory and speed which had ever happened to me until i partitioned the drive. But first look at the capacity of programs intalled on the drive.

You need not start again. There are softwares supporting it which will assist you through the process or manually after booting into the windows

1.Right click on "My Computer" and select "Manage"

2.Under "Storage" of "Computer Management", click "Disk Management"

3. Right click the drive that appears on the right side of the screen and follow the intructions by selecting the command.

NB: Partition Magic is only compactible with Desktop editions not Server editions

Answer 4

One good reason to partition your hard drive is for backup purposes.  It makes it a lot easier to backup a partition, as opposed to the whole drive, with a program such as Norton Ghost (I totally recommend this program and you should back up because crashes/hard drive failures WILL happen).  Since a partition is the smallest unit that can be backed up with this program, it'd be a lot faster than backing up a 750 GB drive!

By separating your files by partition, it makes it easier to store and find things (I.E. I have one partition for MP3s, one for movies, one for software, one for games, etc...).  Since there are localized partitions, defragging can be done on a smaller scale (some partitions wont change in size much, others will) which makes defragging more efficient and quicker to do.

As well, it's good to have an alternative hard drive for games or CPU intensive programs.  This is because your operating system is constantly being used and having your operating system reading from one hard drive, while running a game means slower performance (since there is only one read head on a hard drive it will have to bounce around doing twice as many tasks).

I am sure there are other answers too =)