Adding Partitions

What's the benefit or purpose for adding partitions if you only run one OS?
A lot of people do it, so there must be a variety of reasons?

I can think of a few reasons why I would use more than one partition.

• The most used reason would be to separate Data from the OS partition.
• There are always the possibility of separating business from pleasure.
• Business or pleasure, there is always subcategories that can use a partition of their own.

I personally think using multiple partitions are difficult to manage. I prefer folder levels for data management. Unless I have no choice, I will only use one partition per drive (other than the OS partition).

If data is placed on a different drive than your other activities, to access it you would have to go back to "Computer" and select the appropriate drive, right?
Seems like an extra step for a minimal benefit, or am I missing something?

I have a new computer coming and the model I selected has a 1TB HDD. That's actually more storage than I can use, and depending on how the disk is partitioned, I could possibly add a drive to it to make it seem more manageable?
Just wondering if it's worth messing with.

If your data is on a partition of its own, the OS partition can be wiped without harming your data. This is ideal for system recovery or re-installing the OS.

I don't have one shred of data stored on the OS partition. The OS partition can be wiped at anytime. You never know when the need to use a system backup image may arise.

• I never have used Windows Explorer and couldn't care less about Libraries.
• I manually organize all my personal data and downloads on D:\.
• Windows Live Mail storage is configured to use D:\.
• Office Apps are configured to use D:\ as default storage drive.

It may be true that I go an extra step to store my data but in the end there is far less effort keeping my data.

Good point Clifford!
As for the xtra step, then it's true that you have to go back and select the specific drive number you want?
Sorry for the dumb questions, but I just never had to deal with it before.

My present computer has just 2 drives, C & D.
The C:\ is system, data, everything. D:\ just has a factory image for recovery.

So one more question.......If I added a third drive F:\ for example and in the future I performed a full recovery from the factory recovery disk D:\, would it only affect the C:\ drive or would it wipe the C:\ and the F:\ drive both?

Performing a recovery from the D:\ drive like that, I'm not sure if it would give me the option to select a specific drive? Do you know?
Thanks for your help!

Actually, the system maintains pointers to your library data (documents, music, videos, etc) so if you physically move where these objects are stored (as opposed to creating an additional folder on the other drive) then the system will just start pointing to the new drive when you go to save.

Also if you add a third partition it will likely become E: and your DVD-Rom drive will move to F: (of course you can change this)

And, no, your recovery drive was designed to go to a single drive and that is what it would still do. It would work fine for fixing corrupt system files but if you ever needed a full recovery then you would be best to use an image created after you have modified your system to use data on another drive. Basically you tweak the system to get it working just how you want and then you make a new image of the C: drive in that state and THAT is what you use for a complete restore, not the restore drive. See Acronis or Macrium Reflect in the Backup & Recovery:section of our Freeware DB for tools to make an image. Just FYI, if you did use your recovery drive to do a full reinstall, the data on your E: (or F: ) drive wouldn't be touched but folders would be created on C: for your data and you would then have to redo all the modifications to change your library pointers to the data drive.

Here's a picture to help explain DD
Under Libraries/Docs. I don't have to open E to access my AllDocs folder that I created. Just had to point to it 1 time.

Now from Yodap's attachment I can tell he didn't actually relocate his default documents library (because you can still see his c:\users\PQ), he simply added an extra library pointer to his E: but, it is actually possible to relocate the default library to your new hard drive if you prefer.

Thanks a lot guys, your ideas really got my curiosity going, I didn't know you could change all those pointers, etc etc! I decided to see what I could do......
First I went into Windows Disk Management, shrunk my C:\ drive and created and formatted a 3rd drive Y:\, and added a folder to it for Docs.

Then I started playing with the Start Menu and Libraries and discovered I could actually set the Start Menu to point to my Y:\ drive Docs!

See what you guys did? I had no idea how to do all that till now. I'm doing digital surgery on my computer & I never even went to medical school! LOL
I'm definitely going to create a 3rd drive on that new one when it gets here next week.

I'll NEVER switch to W8 now, I'll be having too much fun with W7!

Yes. You are missing "shortcuts". The shortcut on your desktop will point Windows Explorer to the correct location.

But to answer your question, if you have more than one partition (or drive) then there are quite a few extra steps involved. If you want all your applications to be installed somewhere other than under C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86), then EVERY TIME you install anything, you must use the custom install option and select the new location - if the program allows it. Some don't and that is lazy programming IMO.

That said, to keep extra fluff and other junk being foisted on our systems, we should use the custom install options to opt-out of everything we can.

With 1Tb coming, unless you have many 1000s of tunes of videos, that should be plenty. You might want to partition off a section for backups but those won't help you if the drive fails.

I personally always partition my drives. But I suspect that is due to me being a long-time computer user, who used to always be running out of space. So I add a drive. Now I am just used to have multiple drives and partitions.

I always keep just the OS and hardware drivers on my C partition. I have all my applications, temporary folders, documents and data files on my D partition. And my E drive is a little SSD dedicated to my Page File.