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Possible Duplicate:
Advantages/Disadvantages of Partitioning a Drive

Be it an external hard disk or an internal one running an Operating System; is there any benefit to partitioning a hard disk other than to organize files? If there are, please list them.

Community
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Thomas
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  • the duplicate does list advantages for partitioning an internal hard disk running an OS. Are there any advantages for partitioning an external hard disk? – Thomas Sep 28 '11 at 16:39
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    In that case, the question is a duplicate of http://superuser.com/q/98335/494 and http://superuser.com/q/197501/494 – sblair Sep 28 '11 at 16:45

3 Answers3

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of course,

  1. you can format partitions independently
  2. you can mount, unmount partititions (mostly in Unix environment)
  3. you can use different file systems for different partitions
  4. easier recovery
  5. you can use encryption for certain partition.
  6. you can check disk for errors and it will be fast on smaller sized partitions

It's always good idea to use one partition for OS (system files) another for data etc. In unix/linux systems there is also so called swap partition, it's used for virtual drive (in case when there is not enough RAM)

In case you have large external Hard Drive you can use LVM if you familiar. Or just one huge partition, why not?

bakytn
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  1. Preventing overflowing data from killing your OS.
  2. Using different filesystems for different purposes (e.g. raw for DBMS).
  3. Using different filesystems for multibooting various operating systems.
  4. Ditto VMs.
  5. Hiding things (a little bit).
sblair
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RedGrittyBrick
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Partitioning your HD allows you to mount different volumes off the same HD. No benefits other that separating your system files from user files.

Wuffers
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jay
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