Any general reason to split up drive in multiple partitions?

[Arkalius]

So I'm getting ready to build my new system. I have a 1TB HDD in it and I'm wondering how to partition it. Typically, I just create one partition and go with that. I was wondering though if there's some benefit of splitting up partition while lacking any other specific need to do so.

 

[Yoda4561]

I usually have a 60 gig boot/windows partition and then just divide up the rest as you like. I have mine split up into windows/applications/media/downloads

 

[Arkalius]

Well my windows will be on an SSD. Do you gain any objective benefit from splitting up like that, or is just a personal organization preference?

 

[sub.mesa]

Don't split up your SSD, there's no point at least from a performance perspective. More free space means less fragmentation, which is good. So having one pool sharing all free space is not only much more convenient, but also (slightly) better for performance; especially if otherwise you might keep some partitions quite full while still writing/modifying data to it.

Some people prefer to have their OS on a separate partition of any other data, so they can reinstall easily or for whatever reason. Those reasons may still be valid regardless of using SSDs; but since the capacity is so low, i suggest you limit the number of partitions, preferably to just one large partition.

There may be a reason to leave some space on your SSD totally unused though. This is called overprovisioning, and can only be done on either a brand new SSD - never written to - or a used SSD after performing a Secure Erase procedure by HDDerase.exe or Linux/BSD equivalents. The advantage here is that you give the SSD more spare space which is good for maintaining its performance levels; thus fighting performance degradation. This is especially important on Intel SSDs since they have few spare space, but with Sandforce + compression you should have plenty for casual use. Besides this technique is especially powerful on setups which lack TRIM ability, such as SSDs in RAID on windows.

 

[Arkalius]

I wasn't planning on splitting the SSD. I'm more concerned with the 1TB HDD I have.

 

[sub.mesa]

Sorry i misunderstood this phrase:

Well my windows will be on an SSD. Do you gain any objective benefit from splitting up like that

Generally, on your HDD you may also want to keep just one partition; its easier and sometimes faster. Convenience may be more important here. And if you make multiple partitions you have to assign a prefixed amount of space to each one; not really flexible.

 

[Zepher]

I only partition a large drive if it is going to contain the OS.
My current OS is on a 200GB partition on my 1TB Black.
The other 13 drives are not partitioned.

 

[Yoda4561]

The only benefit other than just keeping things more organized is "short stroking" If you're going to put your games on that 1TB drive then put the ones you want to load fastest on the first partition (200 gigs or less in size), and use the rest of the drive for mass storage.

 

[MrGuvernment]

only benefit is if your OS takes a crap and you got your files on the other partition, you can format and not lose everything \

there is zero performance gain, or any thing noticable by partitioning a single drive.

 

[Lord Nassirbannipal]

Another vote for not partitioning.

I only partition my OS drive because there's other data on it that I don't want to lose if I have to reinstall. For other drives that only contain data, there's no reason at all to partition. It certainly doesn't increase performance.

 

[Metaluna]

This is not really relevant to a single-user Windows installation, but another reason to partition is to manage free space so that critical system processes will not have all their disk space eaten up by user home directories or a runaway process dumping loads of crap in /tmp (I wouldn't be surprised if there are denial-of-service attacks that rely on eating up free space too). So you might want to put root, /tmp, and the user homes on separate partitions or volumes. Or, in something like ZFS you could create separate filesystems for each one and assign quotas to them.

 

[drescherjm]

You guys would think I am ridiculous. I have at minimum 5 partitions per disk on both of my home (linux based) desktops. I do this to mainly separate the specific data sets. Of course a lot of this is because I use a separate lvm volume group on each disk (no raid at home).

 

[MrCrispy]

I split up into an OS and data partition, move my profile to the data partition, and then I can reimage the os anytime without losing anything.

 

[MrGuvernment]

no issues using it for organization drescherjim, me i prefer to just use folders, this way i don't have to worry about running out of space or needing to resize drives.

 

[Red Falcon]

Partition only if you need it for shared drives or for personal preference. It doesn't increase performance at all, but it can help in sharing situations if only one disk is available.