Should i partition 2tb external hard drive

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. Thus, optimizing the placement of files on the disk is not a concern.

And you don't need to defragment SSDs. Don't worry about "wearing out" your SSD by partitioning it, by the way. The SSD organizes files on its own regardless of the partitions, so there's no "uneven wear" issue.

Decided that you want to create a new partition on your hard drive? We have you covered. Check out our guide to managing hard drive partitions in Windows We've looked at some pros and cons of partitioning your disk. In summary, the potential hassle involved, compared to the relatively small gain for the average user, means you should probably stick to what you have now.

But partitioning offers benefits for power users who want logical separation of data and don't mind juggling free space. Here are the differences between advertised vs. He left his IT job to write full-time in and has never looked back. He's been covering tech tutorials, video game recommendations, and more as a professional writer for over seven years.

What Is Disk Partitioning? Share Share Tweet Email. Ben Stegner Articles Published. Subscribe to our newsletter Join our newsletter for tech tips, reviews, free ebooks, and exclusive deals! Hope this helps! As Leo pointed out, multiple partitions in a single physical drive do not protect you against hard disk failure and, yes, since it may cause files you need concurrently to be physically distant from each other on the hard disk, due to partitioning, it will slow down the computer being that hard disk reading is one of the slowest things a computer does.

Certainly, Windows files are being used almost constantly. If you place your data files in another partition, the reading mechanism will be jumping all over if you happen to need to scan a large database. What would be the reason for supplying new computers with partitioned hard disks? At present, the disk with GB can be seen everywhere with the expansion of computer disk space, so to partition a hard drive with a large amount of space become more and more urgent.

How to partition a hard drive? Maybe use 3rd-party partition utility. So kind of you! The more useful information I have found throuth the article—Guidelines on how to partition a hard drive by Creating, Deleting, Formatting and Resizing Partition.

Share with you all. Hi,I deleted the partition on my hard drive,i deleted the D drive and i was left with the drive labelled C. So far so good!! I thought if i deleted the D drive,the capacity i was deleteing would be transferred to the C drive,so doubling the C drive.

Why has this happened,i have restarted the Samsung NC10 but still no gain in the C drive. Thanks Alan. Is a partition useful against virus attack? I think to duplicate data in D and E disk-partition so if one is attacked, I have the back-up here in the same hard drive. Is it OK? Hi Leo — good article. In context of size of hard drives these days, is this a reason not to partition?

In fact, it would tend to decrease usable space. If one drive fills up to almost full, some of the free space in the drive might become unusable. I find partitioning very useful in organising major types of data such as: documents, software, movies, recovery, projects. Its also very useful because when the system goes down, only c: drive is affected none of the data. I also have a second internal hard drive for backup of the first drive.

External hard drives are useless, two of them went down with mechanical failure. Hi Leo, Thanks for nice explanation. My new laptop is configured with a single partition having window7 installed in it.

What you suggest? Rgds, Bhupender. Hi Leo, Thanks for your prompt reply. My system is also having a one key recovery feature, changing the partition size will also make the recovery feature useless, as it will not work. So I will go with you and not planning to go for hardisk partitioning any more. Also i have already purchased a good licensed antivirus software to make the system secure.

Just one more query, I have heard about system restore application of windows, i just wanted to know how effective it is in case of some malware attack. Although i can any time revert to the factory setting using one key recovery feature, but this will make me loose many of the installed applications.

Best Regards, Bhupender. Bhupender System restore can do very little in helping to recover from a virus. You might find these articles useful Can I get rid of spyware using system restore? Hi, i download a lot of movies and regularly change what games im playing, which means im constantly moving watched movies to a portable hard-drive and sometimes back again to watch. On an average month i would transfer gig of data between my main drive and my portable drives.

Is this data transfer high enough that i would be better off partitioning my hard drive into system plus main programs and data files? Since installing Win 8, the backup image would be quickly outdated due to updated versions of software i regularly use. Although i still have a small encrypted partition and a large one for big, rarely accessed PDF files.

I have opted for partitioning in order to be able to install the main OS on the C drive but then install all other programs on the D drive the partition. That way if I ever need to format the C drive alone as part of some sort of maintenance I will not have to lose precious time reinstalling all the programs.

However I have never come to this point until now…and although I am about to reinstall my precious C drive with the main OS as it has slowed considerably, I have no clue whatsoever how to recall he programs installed on the D drive.

Can you help me with this, please? Dan Installing your programs on the D: drive is an interesting idea, but unfortunately, if you reinstall the OS, the installed programs will no longer work. When a program is installed, it makes changes to the registry and usually installs files in various places on the c: drive. So when you reinstall Windows, the programs will look for these files, and not finding them will cause the program to error out. I have always had OS et al on C: and data on D: mainly for backup but it also faciltates uncomplicated copying of a whole partition over to a new computer, and allows me to reinstall OS image without worrying about the data.

In addition, I use substitute drives using the subst DOS command. I heave a sigh of relief each time subst still works when I upgrade to a new OS, particularly to Win8. I have a new HP Laptop with Windows 8.

C is for everything, but recovery, which is handled by D, In the past I have partitioned my HD into several partitions for data, photos, etc. As to backing up my data, I stumbled upon a unique way of handling it.

You plug it into your computer and forget about it. The first time you use it you check off what you want backed up- data, pictures, etc. The first backup takes a little time that depends on the amount of data you have on your computer, but from that point on whenever you turn on your computer the USB drive scans your internal drive and just adds any new data, photos, etc. I find it to be the perfect solution to backing up your data, the USB Drive, as long as you leave it plugged in you can take it out after it does its back-up at start-up, but I have enough USB slots to leave it in automatically backs up your data without you having to remember to do anything.

If you have a crash, loss of data. It is most annoying to fill your data partition and find you have lots of spare space on your OS partition!

Each to his own, I guess. I used to set up multiple partitions in the old days, but there is little value for it now, with NTFS. I find that speeds things up a lot.

It also allows you to keep an image of your OS and Programs separately from your data, which can come in handy. Other than that, if I am just using one drive, I just make sure that I keep all my data in the My Documents folder, and keep it classified in sub folders.

Does the same thing that partitions used to do. And its easy to just back up your documents folder. I frequently backup by making an image file of drive C:, and keeping the page file off that partition saves a bunch of room in the image file the page file is 4 GB—why clutter up the image with that meaningless data? The computers are fast enough that there is little or no speed advantage.

I find that when that happens it is a time consuming pain-in-the-butt to reinstall all of the programs and all of the updates to a new hard-drive.

Years ago, I would do that but, now I mirror the entire hard-drive which I update fairly regularly. Having a mirror allows me to swap the drives in 15 minutes or less, and the computer is back to where it was before the crash. An alternative to having a dedicated mirror drive is to have a good image backup. Same result, just takes a little bit more time to restore the image after the failed drive has been replaced.

The only real reason to use partitions is for the multi-boot capability. You can also use drive spanning to increase your space without having to migrate. I started using this procedure when working on servers with raid arrays especially those that grew over time and it has worked fine for me in that environment and on home desktops. I have always kept my OS and programs on C: drive and my personal data on one or more partitions, so that when I do a clean install or re-image my C: drive, all my data is left intact.

And I move my Favorites to my data partition for the same reason. I bought a HP Pavilion Envy dektop. It came with a 2TB hard drive with a restore partition. Put the 2TB drive in storage just in case. I put a small GB hard drive as the second drive for daily use called drive E. Installed a eSata card with port multiplication.

The 4 bay enclosure can easily be swapped between my Windows 7 and 8. 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. Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It only takes a minute to sign up. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. I got a 2 TB Western Digital Elements hard drive, and I want to use it as a storage device to back up all my movies and songs and other Data. I am assuming you are talking about running this hard drive under a Windows OS, if that is the case then KCotreau is right, there are no performance benefits.

I personally have my network drives setup as all different locations, a "Music" drive, a "Videos" drive, etc I find this helps me keep more organized as I am forced to pick a drive that fits the type instead of just dropping it in the root of the drive and forgetting about it.

There are small benefits you can gain besides performance based ones if you partition the drive. For example, you could encrypt your "Documents" drive, yet leave the music and video partitions open.

Also NTFS allows drive compression to save disk space, but this can degrade performance, so maybe you dont want your "Videos" compressed because then they wont stream as well, but perhaps compressing the "Music" partition is fine because you only really listen to music on your mp3 player. All of these features can be done on the folder level too, but doing them at the drive level really helps enforce that it is always so. If you DO partition your drive I would suggest creating whats called and "extended partion" across the whole drive.

The reason for this is that you can only put 4 primary native partitions on one drive, whereas if you create an "extended partition" first, you can make as many "logical" partitions as you want after that! One last thing, if you DO partition it all up, just be aware that if you end up filling one partition completely full lets say the videos partition , you could have a heck of a time resizing the other partitions to make room for more space on video partition.

It is also dangerous too. I have had partition resize and moves fail on me half way through. This left all of my data in a partition that was neither declared, or in the right place es There are no performance benefits you are still writing to the same, one, drive. Personally, I use them as one big chunk. I only partition my main internal drive into System C: and Data D: , otherwise, unless you have another logical divider like that that you REALLY want to use like movies on one partiton, and songs on another , one partition is fine.

Even though this discussion is quite old, I found some facts not being exposed for a new visitor. You need to consider several other things before deciding to go with 1 big partition per drive such as :.