To partition or not

[druiaghtagh]

What are the pros and cons of partioning an 80Gb hard drive please?

[d0gsb0dy]

One of the advantages of partitioning is that you can back up your programmes on the second half of the drive in the event of having to reformat. Can't think of any disadvantages.

[Ralph]

As d0gsb0dy said, there isn't any real drawbacks in partitioning a large drive. If you asked about the drawbacks of partitioning an 80GB drive in half or installing two 40GB drives, then there are some drawbacks to partitioning. Mainly, it's if one hard disk goes, you've lost the lot whereas with the two drive setup you haven't. Realistically though, if one of your disks goes in a two disk setup, it's just as likely to be a major PITA as if you'd lost it all.

The major benefit from a two disk setup versus a partitioned single disk is that you can split your Windows swap file between the disks to improve virtual memory reading and writing. This would really only benefit you if you were using seriously computationally intensive applications such as finite element analysis. I feel myself becoming a major geek, so I shall shuffle off now!

[dduggan]

I think one of the greatest advantages of partitioning a HDD is that you are then able to keep Windows or whatever OS you use on one partition seperate from other data on the other partition. This is particullarly useful if the OS messes up and this way your data on the other partition stays safe as you reinstall the OS.

Of course this would not work if you suffered a HDD failure and everything gets lost anyway :)