1 TB hard drive question

[Getback]

I set up a new 1 TB hard drive with no partitions. I was wondering if I should divide that up some. If so what is a good partitioning tool.

[fbWldcat]

I'd say if you download movies and music, you portion off some of the HD for that, some HD for games and a little left over for random material (reports, PPTs, Word documents, spreadsheets, etc).

I only ever play AH and download a couple clips of basketball games for my enjoyment, so I don't need to portion it off. It just depends on what your needs are.

Am I thinking of the correct thing?  All that (non-alcoholic) eggnog and huge Christmas dinner... My brain is fried.

[guncrasher]

I got a 1tb with 3 partitions.  one for windows and all the crapware, other for aces high and things related to it, third for music and videos.  I did that so I can easily find stuff.  I have a second drive just for backups which is partioned into 2.  one for back up of the first drive, second for backups of my droid x phone.  lots of movies videos, etc.  also keep ah movies or movie related crap in it.  seems to keep  all my stuff easily available.  I may be wrong and slow my system down, but at least I know where everything is.

semp

[hyster]

if u have win7 (probs vista as well. ive never owned vista) there is a built in program that does it.

control panel / admin / disk management 

select disk

right click on disk and "shrink" (select size to shrink by in MB).

right click on the newly created space to the right and "extend"  (select size to extend by in MB ).

right click again and select "change drive letter and paths" if you want to change it from d:\ to g:\ (example)

personally id have c:\100gb and d:\ 900gb for long term storage (films n images).

the sizes are easily adjusted in disk management if 100gb is not enough, but i ;like to keep my installed programs to a minimum IE: install what im not using.

the benefits of having a separate windows and storage partition is that when u reinstall windows u don't lose ur stored data or have to mess about backing it up somewhere.

[Ghosth]

Personally anytime I've dealt with large drives it tended to be easier to partition them into 2 or 3 than deal with the workaround.

Plus having multiple partitions means you are ready if you choose to want to play with another OS at some point down the road.

I always felt like it was part of installing the drive, formatting, and installing the OS.
Just one more step that only took a few minutes and gave me more options later.

[Getback]

I screwed up or so I thought. Seems that some software had issues. So I reloaded everything! I separted into two drives and plan on separating the D drive into 2 drives eventually. Then I finally got smart and scheduled weekly backups to a drive on the other computer.

[Krusty]

Why partition it at all?

Unless you're getting creative with boot order, there's no need. Just be clear and structured with your directories and you'll know where things are.

[Getback]

Why partition it at all?

Unless you're getting creative with boot order, there's no need. Just be clear and structured with your directories and you'll know where things are.

yeah, I'm leaving it alone. It runs beautifully!

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Why partition it at all?

Unless you're getting creative with boot order, there's no need. Just be clear and structured with your directories and you'll know where things are.

Some people like to be able to format their operating system partition without having to pull 800 gigs of data from a backup media doing so. A pretty good reason for partitioning

1 partition users are typically the ones who spend a month fighting spyware / viruses and left with a compromised system instead of doing a quick and dirty reinstall - all because restoring all that data would take an eternity. If the backup even exists, that is. Most casual PC users have no backups.

[Krusty]

That's a valid point if that's the only HD in your system. I upgraded, adding the 1TB to an existing 100GB. The 100GB is my primary, hence I still have that backup ability (move from 1TB to 100GB, and so forth).

[Stogie]

For a partition tool you can try Easus at www.partition-tool.com  Its free for the home edition not sure of the limitations but works great on XP.  haven't checked what other OS's it may or may not work on.
 

[Tigger29]

If you have a western digital drive, you can get a free copy of Acronis back up software.  I don't know if it will work if you don't have a WD drive installed but it's worth a shot.

Click here: http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&wdc_lang=en

[Ghosth]

Partitions give you options, period.

Want to experiment with a new OS, have a spare partition waiting, sure, go ahead.
Want to try a dual boot so you can take your time learning a new OS without screwing up the existing setup, partition already established makes that easy.

Part of your drive getting pretty fragmented, move the stuff you can to an empty partition and watch that defrag speed through whats left.

Granted the need to split big drives because window's does not recognise over XXX bytes is gone.
But all the other reasons for partitions still exist if you think about it.

In short, 2 minutes on the drive install can save you hours later.

Ohhh and last and best reason, if you don't partition your drive, your OS will be in C:/windows.
Right where every virus and malware knows where to look for it.

But if you have a partitioned drive, you can put your main OS on D:/Windows. I don't know how many times I've saved having to restart from scratch because I didn't catch the bug. But it is enough to be worth taking the time to make a partition or 2.

[BaldEagl]

I run two hard drives rather than partitioning (actually four but two are network back-up drives; 2x250 Gb + 2x500 Gb).  I put my OS and all my apps on one and use the other for documents, movies, music, pictures, downloaded files, etc., etc.  All that stuff that's constantly being moved, deleted, added to or changed is on the second drive and the primary drive is relatively static. That reduces the need to defrag my primary drive and when I do it's quick.  Even though it may be a mess the second drive is also fast to defrag as there are no system files on it so it's simply a matter of filling in the empty spaces on the drive rather than defrag having to decide what needs to be at the front of the drive vs the end of the drive, etc.

I like using two drives simply because two read/write heads working in tandem are faster than one however all the other principles stated above apply to a partitioned drive.

I would hate having to wait for a single large drive to defrag.