## Drive Partitioning

As you probably know a hard drive is to be split into one or more partitions, since it cannot hold data until it is carved up and space is set aside for an operating system. Until recently most PCs used to have just one partition, which filled the entire hard disk and contained an OS. The situation has changed however, thanks to new cost-effective high capacity hard drives, thus opening up numerous possibilities for PC users, such as editing video, archiving music, backing up CD images, etc. Huge increase in space is great, but it poses a number of problems, most important of which are effective data organization and speed.

Large drives are always going to take longer to search than smaller volumes, and an operating system is going to have its work cut out both finding and organizing files. It is for this reason that many people decide to invest in multiple hard drives, but there is an easy solution – drive partitioning. Partitioning lets you divide a single physical drive into a number of logical drives, each of which servers as a container with its own drive letter and volume label, thus enabling the operating system to process data more efficiently. Besides partitioning makes it possible to organize data so that it is easy to find and manage. You can set aside, for instance, 40 GB of a 160 GB hard drive for the OS, 70 GB for storing video and another 50 GB for your favorite music collections to provide transparent data storage.

It is also worth mentioning to that with a hard drive properly partitioned, such routine operations as files de-fragmentation or consistency check will not be that annoying and time-consuming any more.

By detaching the OS from the rest of the data you can tackle one more crucial issue – in case of a system malfunction, you can get the system back on track in minutes by recovering it from a backup image located on the other partition of the hard drive.

But that is not all drive partitioning may be used for. If you are willing to play games in Windows while browsing the Internet in Linux, 100-percent sure that no virus will attack your PC, drive partitioning is a necessity. In order to run several OSs on a single hard drive you are to create a corresponding number of partitions to effectively delineate the boundaries of each OS.