Why You Should Partition (Split) Your Hard Disc Drive

Why You Should Partition (Split) Your Hard Disc Drive

If you own a computer, you own a HDD (Hard Disk Drive). And if you own a HDD you have a partition or partitions on that HDD. Partitions are different parts of the HDD that are used as though they are a completely different HDD. Even though they're on the same disk.

Usually you will have the C: drive where your OS is installed. But some HDD's may be split into two or three or more partitions such as a D: E: F: drive etc. In fact, there is a very legitimate and practical reason for partitioning your HDD.

The first reason is because if you're only using one partition (The C: Drive) and that partition becomes corrupt due to hardware failure, corrupted sectors etc or because of some nasty virus infection that corrupts all your files on the HDD. It will only be able to infect the files that are on your C: drive.

And if you store all your files/downloads/videos/pictures and files etc on your C: drive as well, you could potentially loose them forever. So that's why people partition their HDD so that they can have separate partitions for different things.

For example, I have partitioned my HDD into two drives a C: (where my OS is installed) and a D: (where I store my downloaded files etc). This offers some protection in case C: does become infected/corrupt. Although some particularly nasty viruses are able to infect every partition on your HDD in which case it doesn't really matter.

But doing this does offer some benefits though and is well worth doing. For example: If you only use a C: drive and store all your downloaded files etc on that same drive, you will have to back them up somewhere when you want to format and reload Windows. But if you store all your downloaded files etc to a different partition (A D: drive or something) you can just wipe the C: drive and the D: drive (partition) will be fine and left alone.

Well that's the way I do it anyway! And I really urge anyone that is using only one partition (Just a C: drive) on their HDD to split (partition) their HDD for these reasons. It will make it much easier when you want to format/reinstall a fresh copy of Windows. Also that process will be quicker too since it will only need to wipe however big you make the C: drive. The C: drive should be a minimum size of at least 10GB for Windows7 and around 20GB for Windows10. But an ideal size is to make it three times as big as you'll need it because if you install a lot of large apps and that, that can take up a lot of space too.

Plus it makes it much easier if you need to reinstall some software or drivers etc after you've just reloaded Windows because you don't need to attach any external drives by USB and mess around with that you can do it all from within Windows.


As you can see from this print screen of my drives. I have split my 1 terabyte HDD into 2 partitions. I basically just added a new partition the D: drive. I've given my C: drive plenty of space in which to grow in. But my D: drive has the most space. I'm not even really using that much of it. If this was 10 years ago that would be full up but I don't do a lot of downloading and stuff these days like I used to. Random pointless fact.

Anyway, there are other practical reasons and benefits for split or partitioning your HDD. The most obvious ones already stated here. So for those reasons alone, it's well worth doing! The thing is, a lot of people don't do this and just always use the C: drive for everything. Then when their Windows becomes corrupted/infected and they can't boot into it anymore. It means they can't access their files too.

Trust me I know that because that happened to me many years ago back in the days of Window XP. I used to use the one drive only and store all my stuff on it like notes, files, photos, images etc and something went wrong, can't remember exactly now, but my HDD just stopped working properly possibly because of a hardware failure or some other corruption. Basically the only thing I could do was wipe it and reinstall Windows loosing all my saved files in the process. That was many years ago now and I no longer even really remember what I lost. But in a way I'm grateful for it happening because through it, I learned a valuable lesson. A lesson that Microsoft or even Apple or any PC manufacture or seller don't ever tell or think to tell you!

And that lesson is that you shouldn't use the same partition for saving your personal/work files etc that your Windows OS is installed to. It's much better to let Windows have its own partition and create/use a separate partition for all your data/downloads and other stored files etc.

And to do that isn't overly hard or complicated. Windows provides the Disk Management Tool just for that which is fairly straight forward to use. Just type "Partition" or "diskmgmt.msc" into the Windows Search box for Windows 7 users to open it. Should be the same for Windows 10 too?

It looks like this.

The Windows Disk Management Tool lets you see all the partitions on your HDD. As you can see from mine, I have a C: partition, a D: partition and two others that are reserved for my recovery partition and system used partition.

How to Partition a Windows 7 Hard Drive

This video shows how to use the Windows Disk Management Tool to partition your HDD into separate partitions as described above. NOTE: This is for Windows 7.

There are also some excellent 3rd party HDD partition manager tools and softwares out there. Some free and some paid. In the past I've used Partition Magic but I don't think it's available anymore. I think EaseUS Partition Master is the next best free one. But if you do a Google search for "free hard drive partition software" you can find many others. They all basically do the exact same thing as the Windows Disk Management Tool does though.

So yeah, I just wanted to share this with you. Just in case you're one of those people that only have a C: drive (partition) that your PC came with because doing this can have a lot of practical benefits which I've explained above.

I hope it helps!

Let me know if you have any questions!

Have you ever partitioned your HDD?

What HDD partitioning software can you recommend?