The downside to partitioning a hard drive is that you may actually be
wasting space and it may cause problems in the future. For example consider
the following scenario. Say you have a
10gb hard drive consisting of two 5gb partitions with 500 Mb  free space on
each partition. That is a total of 1000 Mb  free space on the entire hard
drive. Suppose you want to install a game that takes up 650mb.How do you do
it? The only way you can is to juggle 150MB worth of  files from one
partition to
another. If that is not possible you can't install the game. That is,even
with 1000 MB  free space on your entire hard drive you can't install a 650
MB game. If that is not a wastage of space I don't know what is.

So you see partitioning your hard drive may cause problems in the future
because regardless of whether you have a 10gig , 30gig or a 100gig hard
drive it will (eventually) fill up. Hence I think it is better to have just
one huge partition covering your entire hard drive.

If organising files is your only aim, using directories is a better choice.

Abdul Samad Abdul Razzak
Sri Lanka

----- Original Message -----
From: "William Closure" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2001 7:53 AM
Subject: Why would one want to partition a hard drive?


> I have read about people partitioning hard drives, and I'm trying to
> understand the benefits, as well as the down side.  On the upside,
separate
> partitions could be made for each person who uses the computer, thus
> isolating that person's files (although it would be just as easy to create
> directories for each person.)  And, likewise, those isolated files could
be
> more easily deleted, copied, etc..  And, I guess you could defrag each
drive
> individually.  But, does it do anything to improve day to day operations?
> And, what are the downsides?  Any tutorials out there about the pros and
cons?
>
> William Closure
>

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