I agree with your points 2 & 3, of course, and add that, imo, giving the OS exclusive use of it’s own SSD is the way to go.
On point 1., with the exception of a separate partition for the OS, I’d point out that on the ‘bulk’ hard drive(s) using folders rather than partitions is simpler, more flexible, faster, and less demanding on the drive. Simpler, because there’s no messing with partitioning and the entire ‘library’ is viewable in a single, easily organized list. Flexible, because resizing is never needed, and the total available drive space is shared as required, with no wastage. Faster – moving data between partitions can be time consuming, as the drive has to copy/delete it, whereas moving to it another folder is practically instant – all the drive has to do is change the address info. Consider a game download of, say, 30GB – that takes time and drive work to move from ‘Downloads’ to another partition with ‘Games’. If those folders are on the same drive, there’s no work for the drive, and there’s no delay.
I have always insisted having more than one partition as I have two operating systems on my Laptop, namely Windows XP and Windows 7. Obviously, you need to have a NTFS partition for Windows7 and FAT32 for Windows XP. and I always assumed that if your hard disk had only one partition and was NTFS this could slow it down, so it seems logical to have at least 4-5 partitions, and in the situation where the hard drive becomes fragmented, if the partition was a smaller partition, it wouldn’t take as long to defragment it. A friend of mine has only one NTFS partition on her laptop, so she wants me to repartition it – make at least 5 partitions and reinstall Windows 7 on it, which should make it faster.
Hello!
Does a system with more than one partition – also create more ‘Noise’ in comparison to the one with a single partition?
I have experienced the same quite recently…but reasons could have been different too?!
Please suggest?
By splitting the one disk into more than one partition, you will be able to treat the each partition as an independent drive. All in all, we’ll benefit a lot from it, as follows:
1. Better organize your data
2. Run different operating systems on one PC
3. Reduce the threats of data loss
4. More convenient for backup and restore
5. More selective when encrypting drive
6. Improve performance
Therefore, it is suggested to partition a hard drive.
Partitioning a hard drive is necessary for our nowadays usage i suppose it helps to install multiple operating systems and provides data security. Get Best Disk Partition Software for windows and improve efficiency of the system.
It’s helpful but I would like to ask saying that you have to create a partition for the operating system does it mean that the other partitions you will create for picture. music and so on isn’t controlled by the operating system? thx
Hi Janet, it just simply means that dividing your hard disk into more than one partition allows you to install an operating system on one partition and the other for your applications and one for your files – pictures, music,etc. The partitions are separate from each other.
Hello there
First of one ,please let me ask you about creating several partitions on a SSD hard.Can I create and have more than one partition on a SSD hard?
The second one question is
If I can create more than one partition on a SSD hard,then am I able to have my multi-boot program to boot and run the “Windows “in case I want to install more than one OS on a SSD hard?
and finally
How about the”Virtual memory” in the “Windows” OS now?
Consider that I have four Gb of RAM and their slots are full, now I have two options to upgrade my hard
First SSD is a costly one which provide SATAIII
and the second one is a bit cheaper SSD with a lower speed
Now , if the motherboard of the machine just suppors SATAIIthen what do you think I choose to buy?
First option: buying the costly SATAIII and increasing the “Virtual memory” for example from 5555Mb to more in hope to see any better performance from RAM(fully slots 4 Gb RAM).
Second option: buying cheaper SSD hard and doing nothing about the”Virtual memory” because I can not see a clear difference in the performance since I have a fully 4Gb of RAM slots before and the motherboard doesn’t support SATAIII.
Which one do you approve?
You can create multiple partitions on SSD drives, just like you do on HDD drives. Also, dual-boot or multi-boot works the same on SSDs. There’s nothing different to working with HDDs, except the speed.
Yes, and yes. Usually we call them “ToGo” drives (UbuntuToGo, WindowsToGo, DOS, whatever). The target computer has to have a BIOSUEFI option to boot from USB. Microsoft has sanctioned this since Windows 8. I recommend a good USB3 thumb drive, 32GB or more; laughably cheap these days, but you don’t even need that. You certainly don’t need an official Microsoft certified “supported device” unless you want to impress a client. Which is worth every penny. 😉 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_To_Go
and a version of PartitionMagic. But I can’t find the disk I created to identify specifically which “partitionmagic” it was. I think it is the one documented in this wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PartitionMagic
For the longest time, I had been an advocate of an OS partition and a documents/data partition, not only for organization but also presuming that my personal files would be safer on a separate partition if I ever had to reinstall the OS. However, I recently experienced an issue where I configured a hard drive with one 80GB OS partition (which seemed plenty big at the time) and the remainder (~400GB) being allocated for personal files. Over time, the personal file partition grew to well over 50%. But so did the OS partition due to myriad updates and unforeseen software installations!! As the lack of free space on the OS (C:) partition began gradually slowing down the system, I was left me with the conundrum of how to increase the size of the OS partition without using a 3rd party utility (unless there’s a trick for squeezing GBs from another partition that I don’t know about). I believe if I had instead used a folder for the personal/data files instead, I would have the entire capacity of the drive to work with, whether it be operating system files & updates or personal/data files. I now leave the single C: partition alone when I set up a new computer.
That is a valid issue. I am actually running into it also right now. I created a triple boot (original) Vista / Win 7 / Win 8.0 as well as a data partition.
There are a number of freeware disk partition tools you can use from a bootable DVD or USB that can “move” partitions on the drive to reallocate space from one to another. Since you are booting from the DVD, all of the partitions are available to be resized and moved.
Thanks for your detail introduce. Like you said, users need to resize more then one partition. Casually, using disk management does help users to extend more partitions, but the operation is complicate. And sometimes, the complex operation will make users confused.
You need to add another way for creating more partitions to contrast to disk management. There is a third-party tool–MiniTool Partition Wizard. It has several independent functions for creating more partitions, like Resize/Move Partition, Extend Partition, Merge Partition and Split Partition. Different functions with the operation is different, but they can help users to repartition disk.
Yahoo, hallelujah, praise the lord and pass the ammunition …
I’ve been a proponent of creating a data partition for more than 10 years. Back then I bought my laptop with a 254 GB drive. That space allowed to me to create a data partition. And later to make Win 7 and Win 8 partitions to make my machine a triple boot setup …
Agudeza makes good points. His proposed small SSD +large mag disk is a great approach, for home/custom built desktop machines. But, it is still NOT a common configuration from most manufacturers. I expect it will be, in a year or two, but not yet. I’ve been looking, and it is still hard to spec a customized big builder machine delivered from the builder to do multi drives if it is not already spec’d that way. It is possible in some places but not all. And trying to squeeze multiple drives into a laptop is even harder. You basically have to get rid of the CD/DVD drive to make it happen. Which means you have to fall back to partitions.
Recently I’ve been looking for a new machine and have noticed that you can finally buy reasonable size SSD’s, 128GB and up, at reasonable prices. So it makes it possible to DIY upgrade your machine to a second drive.
His point about a dead disk negating the benefit of a Data partitions is definitely valid. But that is a once in multiple year issue (I agree it will likely hit most machines eventually). But, I have been spending a lot of time on help forums and the most common problem right now is Win 10 upgrade issues, where the user wants to back out but can’t. Many are even losing data in the upgrade/downgrade process. A separate data partition would really help with that sort of data problem.
This article really needs links to a companion articles describing exactly how to do this. How to use partition manager(s) to create partitions and how to change the default drive for Windows User Profiles. I previously used 3rd party partition managers, but have found that with Win 7 the default manager was good enough for slightly more advanced partition management. You still need to boot into a 3rd party (usually Nix based) tool to “slide” partitions around to reallocate free space from one to another partition.
Boy I really hate to be the stick in the mud. I never want my opinions to be expressed as recommendation unless I could give reasons that make very good sense. There are only a couple reasons that I see that make adding partitions reasonable. But any reasons are merely a preference of the user and have no real world advantages, except for 1 scenario, which I will mention later. Let me just say this:
There is more risk of data loss by using 1 drive with multpile partitions as opposed to using additional drives to separate OS & Data or in RAID.
Today, it is highly recommended to use an SSD for the OS, and a separate drive for data. Multiple types of data can be categorized under unique folder names on the data drive. This makes much more sense because if a boot drive fails, the data drive is safe. If you have Windows 8 on physical drive 1, Windows 10 on physical drive 2, and data on drive 3, and if drive 1 fails, you still have a functional OS drive and data drive.
Creating a few partitions on 1 drive is only feasible if you are limited to 1 drive in your system. But that’s not a common limitation these days. These days we can acquire an SSD cheap and even a 3TB internal HDD can be had very cheap
So, having multiple partitions on 1 drive puts all data on the drive at risk in the event of a failure. It is not often we can salvage our data on a drive if there is a hardware failure with the drive. But when we can recover any of the data, it is not because we had multiple partitions. Having multiple partitions does not help you minimize data loss in almost all type of failures. If there is a scenario where having a multiple partitions helped minimize data loss after a failure, then we are not talking about a hardware failure. You might be referring to a software crash. But no matter, people with important data should do backups.
Also, multiple partitions does not increase your performance unless using a large capacity HDD in certain ways. For example, having your OS on a smaller partition on a mechanical drive is better because the drive isn’t being scanned outside of the partitioned area while accessing the OS files. As for the data on the system, I do not think it really matters. In this day and age, Windows is actually keeping the drive clean all the time and you will rarely find fragmentation on even the mechanical drives and the SSD isn’t even a concern because Windows manages an SSD differently. All of the reasons for having multiple partitions are pretty much abolished due to all of the hardware and software advances we have today.
There is really only 1 good excuse that can be supported for partitioning a drive and it is the only one that has any merit. That is to manage data. Keeping files organized by drive letter has always been a good way to manage your datas. But, we can do the same thing with folders. And if there was a real performance difference with drive letters as opposed to folders, I’d say make partitions. But, there isn’t. Not now. Not today. If you have a hardware and software configuration that can efficiently run Windows 7, 8, or 10 , there are no real world advantages with multpile partitions that make much difference. But, it isn’t a bad thing to make partitions. It’s just not something that gives you anything other than satisfying a personal preference. Data loss isn’t minimized, and performance is not improved, except under curcumstances that would only apply on a system using a single large capacity mechanical HDD.
Organize Data – At last, something I could agree with. But even still, there’s not very much advantage using multiple partitions to divide data when you could just use folders to categorize your data and accomplish the same thing.
I am not sure I agree that people have fewer issues as a result of having more than 1 partition on their system either. That’s more a speculative opinion and could never be proven unless a couple of them were running the same systems with only 1 partition along side the others with multiple partitions for a period of time that could be said is substantial and enough to evaluate any differences
You are right in making this assumption, but if you have a laptop and it might be feasible to have at least have more than one hard disk, and you can make backups of your data/files and OS files in case one fails and also make backups of your data/files on CD. It does seem feasible having more than one partition so as to increase the speed, as one partition can be used as virtual ram to help speed it up.
Just had to say that this is the most sensible answer, you are correct it is just a personal preferance and even separating system folders like my documents from the os partition can bring its own problems if that partition or hdd fails, Remember NOTHING is perfect, (perfection is an illusion created by the human mind)
Yes, if you have more than one partition, it is good for you. In the above articel, i saw one link about how to manage partitions with disk management, but i want to ask if disk management cannot help me create many partitions and cannot extend partition if unallocated space is not behind a partition you want to extend, how to do? I search in google by myself to search some third software to solve. I find two, aomei partition assistant and gparted, i don’t know which can help me. I tried aomei, and find one article: http://www.disk-partition.com/resource/how-to-partition-a-hard-drive.html it seems useful for me. Recommend to you. Hope it also can solve your problem.
24 Responses to “3 reasons to create more than one partition on your PC”
Thanks for the good article.
I agree with your points 2 & 3, of course, and add that, imo, giving the OS exclusive use of it’s own SSD is the way to go.
On point 1., with the exception of a separate partition for the OS, I’d point out that on the ‘bulk’ hard drive(s) using folders rather than partitions is simpler, more flexible, faster, and less demanding on the drive. Simpler, because there’s no messing with partitioning and the entire ‘library’ is viewable in a single, easily organized list. Flexible, because resizing is never needed, and the total available drive space is shared as required, with no wastage. Faster – moving data between partitions can be time consuming, as the drive has to copy/delete it, whereas moving to it another folder is practically instant – all the drive has to do is change the address info. Consider a game download of, say, 30GB – that takes time and drive work to move from ‘Downloads’ to another partition with ‘Games’. If those folders are on the same drive, there’s no work for the drive, and there’s no delay.
Edit: ‘If those folders are on the same unpartitioned drive, there’s no work for the drive, so there’s no delay.’
I have always insisted having more than one partition as I have two operating systems on my Laptop, namely Windows XP and Windows 7. Obviously, you need to have a NTFS partition for Windows7 and FAT32 for Windows XP. and I always assumed that if your hard disk had only one partition and was NTFS this could slow it down, so it seems logical to have at least 4-5 partitions, and in the situation where the hard drive becomes fragmented, if the partition was a smaller partition, it wouldn’t take as long to defragment it. A friend of mine has only one NTFS partition on her laptop, so she wants me to repartition it – make at least 5 partitions and reinstall Windows 7 on it, which should make it faster.
Hello!
Does a system with more than one partition – also create more ‘Noise’ in comparison to the one with a single partition?
I have experienced the same quite recently…but reasons could have been different too?!
Please suggest?
The noise has nothing to do with the number of partitions that you are using.
Hi,
By splitting the one disk into more than one partition, you will be able to treat the each partition as an independent drive. All in all, we’ll benefit a lot from it, as follows:
1. Better organize your data
2. Run different operating systems on one PC
3. Reduce the threats of data loss
4. More convenient for backup and restore
5. More selective when encrypting drive
6. Improve performance
Therefore, it is suggested to partition a hard drive.
Partitioning a hard drive is necessary for our nowadays usage i suppose it helps to install multiple operating systems and provides data security. Get Best Disk Partition Software for windows and improve efficiency of the system.
It’s helpful but I would like to ask saying that you have to create a partition for the operating system does it mean that the other partitions you will create for picture. music and so on isn’t controlled by the operating system? thx
Hi Janet, it just simply means that dividing your hard disk into more than one partition allows you to install an operating system on one partition and the other for your applications and one for your files – pictures, music,etc. The partitions are separate from each other.
Hello there
First of one ,please let me ask you about creating several partitions on a SSD hard.Can I create and have more than one partition on a SSD hard?
The second one question is
If I can create more than one partition on a SSD hard,then am I able to have my multi-boot program to boot and run the “Windows “in case I want to install more than one OS on a SSD hard?
and finally
How about the”Virtual memory” in the “Windows” OS now?
Consider that I have four Gb of RAM and their slots are full, now I have two options to upgrade my hard
First SSD is a costly one which provide SATAIII
and the second one is a bit cheaper SSD with a lower speed
Now , if the motherboard of the machine just suppors SATAIIthen what do you think I choose to buy?
First option: buying the costly SATAIII and increasing the “Virtual memory” for example from 5555Mb to more in hope to see any better performance from RAM(fully slots 4 Gb RAM).
Second option: buying cheaper SSD hard and doing nothing about the”Virtual memory” because I can not see a clear difference in the performance since I have a fully 4Gb of RAM slots before and the motherboard doesn’t support SATAIII.
Which one do you approve?
Many thanks in advance
You can create multiple partitions on SSD drives, just like you do on HDD drives. Also, dual-boot or multi-boot works the same on SSDs. There’s nothing different to working with HDDs, except the speed.
can you put os systems on a portabale usb drive and use them, without using partitioning, would this work, do you know how to do this?
Yes, and yes. Usually we call them “ToGo” drives (UbuntuToGo, WindowsToGo, DOS, whatever). The target computer has to have a BIOSUEFI option to boot from USB. Microsoft has sanctioned this since Windows 8. I recommend a good USB3 thumb drive, 32GB or more; laughably cheap these days, but you don’t even need that. You certainly don’t need an official Microsoft certified “supported device” unless you want to impress a client. Which is worth every penny. 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_To_Go
What are some of these free partition tools? I am usually hesitant to go with free tools as I have been hit with ransomware in the past.
I used an older (2012) verison of Minitool Partition Wizard
http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html
and a version of PartitionMagic. But I can’t find the disk I created to identify specifically which “partitionmagic” it was. I think it is the one documented in this wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PartitionMagic
For the longest time, I had been an advocate of an OS partition and a documents/data partition, not only for organization but also presuming that my personal files would be safer on a separate partition if I ever had to reinstall the OS. However, I recently experienced an issue where I configured a hard drive with one 80GB OS partition (which seemed plenty big at the time) and the remainder (~400GB) being allocated for personal files. Over time, the personal file partition grew to well over 50%. But so did the OS partition due to myriad updates and unforeseen software installations!! As the lack of free space on the OS (C:) partition began gradually slowing down the system, I was left me with the conundrum of how to increase the size of the OS partition without using a 3rd party utility (unless there’s a trick for squeezing GBs from another partition that I don’t know about). I believe if I had instead used a folder for the personal/data files instead, I would have the entire capacity of the drive to work with, whether it be operating system files & updates or personal/data files. I now leave the single C: partition alone when I set up a new computer.
That is a valid issue. I am actually running into it also right now. I created a triple boot (original) Vista / Win 7 / Win 8.0 as well as a data partition.
There are a number of freeware disk partition tools you can use from a bootable DVD or USB that can “move” partitions on the drive to reallocate space from one to another. Since you are booting from the DVD, all of the partitions are available to be resized and moved.
Thanks for your detail introduce. Like you said, users need to resize more then one partition. Casually, using disk management does help users to extend more partitions, but the operation is complicate. And sometimes, the complex operation will make users confused.
You need to add another way for creating more partitions to contrast to disk management. There is a third-party tool–MiniTool Partition Wizard. It has several independent functions for creating more partitions, like Resize/Move Partition, Extend Partition, Merge Partition and Split Partition. Different functions with the operation is different, but they can help users to repartition disk.
Yahoo, hallelujah, praise the lord and pass the ammunition …
I’ve been a proponent of creating a data partition for more than 10 years. Back then I bought my laptop with a 254 GB drive. That space allowed to me to create a data partition. And later to make Win 7 and Win 8 partitions to make my machine a triple boot setup …
Agudeza makes good points. His proposed small SSD +large mag disk is a great approach, for home/custom built desktop machines. But, it is still NOT a common configuration from most manufacturers. I expect it will be, in a year or two, but not yet. I’ve been looking, and it is still hard to spec a customized big builder machine delivered from the builder to do multi drives if it is not already spec’d that way. It is possible in some places but not all. And trying to squeeze multiple drives into a laptop is even harder. You basically have to get rid of the CD/DVD drive to make it happen. Which means you have to fall back to partitions.
Recently I’ve been looking for a new machine and have noticed that you can finally buy reasonable size SSD’s, 128GB and up, at reasonable prices. So it makes it possible to DIY upgrade your machine to a second drive.
His point about a dead disk negating the benefit of a Data partitions is definitely valid. But that is a once in multiple year issue (I agree it will likely hit most machines eventually). But, I have been spending a lot of time on help forums and the most common problem right now is Win 10 upgrade issues, where the user wants to back out but can’t. Many are even losing data in the upgrade/downgrade process. A separate data partition would really help with that sort of data problem.
This article really needs links to a companion articles describing exactly how to do this. How to use partition manager(s) to create partitions and how to change the default drive for Windows User Profiles. I previously used 3rd party partition managers, but have found that with Win 7 the default manager was good enough for slightly more advanced partition management. You still need to boot into a 3rd party (usually Nix based) tool to “slide” partitions around to reallocate free space from one to another partition.
Boy I really hate to be the stick in the mud. I never want my opinions to be expressed as recommendation unless I could give reasons that make very good sense. There are only a couple reasons that I see that make adding partitions reasonable. But any reasons are merely a preference of the user and have no real world advantages, except for 1 scenario, which I will mention later. Let me just say this:
There is more risk of data loss by using 1 drive with multpile partitions as opposed to using additional drives to separate OS & Data or in RAID.
Today, it is highly recommended to use an SSD for the OS, and a separate drive for data. Multiple types of data can be categorized under unique folder names on the data drive. This makes much more sense because if a boot drive fails, the data drive is safe. If you have Windows 8 on physical drive 1, Windows 10 on physical drive 2, and data on drive 3, and if drive 1 fails, you still have a functional OS drive and data drive.
Creating a few partitions on 1 drive is only feasible if you are limited to 1 drive in your system. But that’s not a common limitation these days. These days we can acquire an SSD cheap and even a 3TB internal HDD can be had very cheap
So, having multiple partitions on 1 drive puts all data on the drive at risk in the event of a failure. It is not often we can salvage our data on a drive if there is a hardware failure with the drive. But when we can recover any of the data, it is not because we had multiple partitions. Having multiple partitions does not help you minimize data loss in almost all type of failures. If there is a scenario where having a multiple partitions helped minimize data loss after a failure, then we are not talking about a hardware failure. You might be referring to a software crash. But no matter, people with important data should do backups.
Also, multiple partitions does not increase your performance unless using a large capacity HDD in certain ways. For example, having your OS on a smaller partition on a mechanical drive is better because the drive isn’t being scanned outside of the partitioned area while accessing the OS files. As for the data on the system, I do not think it really matters. In this day and age, Windows is actually keeping the drive clean all the time and you will rarely find fragmentation on even the mechanical drives and the SSD isn’t even a concern because Windows manages an SSD differently. All of the reasons for having multiple partitions are pretty much abolished due to all of the hardware and software advances we have today.
There is really only 1 good excuse that can be supported for partitioning a drive and it is the only one that has any merit. That is to manage data. Keeping files organized by drive letter has always been a good way to manage your datas. But, we can do the same thing with folders. And if there was a real performance difference with drive letters as opposed to folders, I’d say make partitions. But, there isn’t. Not now. Not today. If you have a hardware and software configuration that can efficiently run Windows 7, 8, or 10 , there are no real world advantages with multpile partitions that make much difference. But, it isn’t a bad thing to make partitions. It’s just not something that gives you anything other than satisfying a personal preference. Data loss isn’t minimized, and performance is not improved, except under curcumstances that would only apply on a system using a single large capacity mechanical HDD.
Organize Data – At last, something I could agree with. But even still, there’s not very much advantage using multiple partitions to divide data when you could just use folders to categorize your data and accomplish the same thing.
I am not sure I agree that people have fewer issues as a result of having more than 1 partition on their system either. That’s more a speculative opinion and could never be proven unless a couple of them were running the same systems with only 1 partition along side the others with multiple partitions for a period of time that could be said is substantial and enough to evaluate any differences
You are right in making this assumption, but if you have a laptop and it might be feasible to have at least have more than one hard disk, and you can make backups of your data/files and OS files in case one fails and also make backups of your data/files on CD. It does seem feasible having more than one partition so as to increase the speed, as one partition can be used as virtual ram to help speed it up.
Just had to say that this is the most sensible answer, you are correct it is just a personal preferance and even separating system folders like my documents from the os partition can bring its own problems if that partition or hdd fails, Remember NOTHING is perfect, (perfection is an illusion created by the human mind)
great article.
Yes, if you have more than one partition, it is good for you. In the above articel, i saw one link about how to manage partitions with disk management, but i want to ask if disk management cannot help me create many partitions and cannot extend partition if unallocated space is not behind a partition you want to extend, how to do? I search in google by myself to search some third software to solve. I find two, aomei partition assistant and gparted, i don’t know which can help me. I tried aomei, and find one article: http://www.disk-partition.com/resource/how-to-partition-a-hard-drive.html it seems useful for me. Recommend to you. Hope it also can solve your problem.