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Re: Hard Drive Partition Posted by Justin VanAbrahams [Email] (#32) [Profile/Gallery] (more from Justin VanAbrahams) on Thu, 21 Feb 2008 10:48:00 In Reply to: Hard Drive Partition, OKSaabs, Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:04:37 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
Generally agree with what people are telling you, but one upside of having a second partition on your drive is that in the event you need to nuke your OS and reinstall, you can keep data intact on the second partition. I always find it convenient to have a secondary partition to store drivers and other various things I've downloaded from the internet... when the inevitable "nuke & reinstall XP" comes along, I don't have to re-download, or fish through CD/DVD backups. I can also copy personal items (like the contents of My Documents) off to that partition, then just copy it back.
Additionally, there may be some additional security tied up in a secondary partition - if one partition's filesystem gets scrambled, you won't compromise everything. I generally keep my OS & programs on the C: and all my data on the D:. It's more likely the OS filesystem will die in an OS crash than data, and keeping all that stuff relatively safe on another partition is some peace of mind. Of course, as others pointed out a physical failure or damage to the partition table will still take both partitions out, but IMHO the chances of Windows crashing and killing the filesystem is greater than a reasonably recent drive just failing.
There is no real downside, except for a possible slight space inefficiency as the drive gets full. These days, however, with essentially disposable computers and enormous capacity disk drives (2tb by the end of the year!) the chances of that negatively impacting you are pretty minor. With modern repartitioning tools (Partition Magic, et al) you can always fix that stuff.
Otherwise, it's just some additional management (choosing whether something ends up on C: or D:), which generally isn't a big deal.
My $0.02, YMMV...
posted by 207.15.18...
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