To partition or not to partition? That is the question.

[Bronx]

I have a 500 gig hard drive. I am goig to use it as a storage drive, it will be a second drive.

Question. Is it easier for the computer to read a partitioned drive?

[jameshgross]

It makes no difference to the computer.

[Dv8ted2]

no difference - It just allows you to set the size of the partition and add more logical drives.

[redwudz]

I haven't used multiple partitions for years. Most of my larger drives are 320GB. A couple of reasons to partition, IMO: If you have just one drive with the boot on it. Having a separate partition for the boot speeds up defragging and antivirus scanning if you just scan the boot partition. But it's much more efficient to have your data drives separate from your boot drive on different channels.

The part about antivirus and defragging could also be applied to a large hard drive, though both operations will still take the same amount of time if you have to check all partitions.

Other than those cases, and probably one or two that I haven't thought of, I don't use multiple partitions. To me they're about like putting a lot of folders on your hard drive, to separate different files. Speed will not be affected much either way as both partitions are still using the same ATA channel to address the partitions. Searching may be a little quicker with partitions if you limit the search to a certain partition.

Some people use them, I don't. Again, just an opinion.

[Bronx]

Thanks for the quick replies.

I am not going to boot from this hard drive. It is just to store family videos, pictures and some music.

If its not going to make a difference I will not partition it.

Thanks againg for the quick replies.