Partitioning Your Hard Drive(s)
Hard drives are identified, by tradition, using a letter and a colon. The
letters generally start with C: and go up. You can create multiple partitions on
your hard drive. If you have two hard drives, and you put two partitions
on them, the result will be:
C: - first partition on first drive
D: - first partition on second drive
E: - second partition on first drive
F: - second partition on second drive
Some partitions that people use:
 | one for the operating system and programs
 | There's no question that operating systems are getting really big. There
are some performance benefits from having this on a different partition from
your data. Also, some programs are not well behaved if you don't put them in
the recommended folders on the c drive. This stuff is always on the primary
partition on the primary drive. |
|
| one for data and documents
| Word processing files, spreadsheets, notes, databases. If you have more
than 5 gigabytes of this information, I'd like to hear about it. |
|
| one for temp files
| Here's a partition that you won't want to back up, and won't mind
deleting files in. |
|
| one for video and audio data
| This can get huge, no matter what size you start with. |
|
| one for the windows paging file
| If you only have one physical hard drive, using a separate partition
produces no benefit. |
|
