As an added note to Abdul's reasons for not partitioning a hard drive:

If my understanding is correct, Virtual Memory space is determined by the amount of free disk space. And
correct me if I'm wrong, but free disk space is determined by the size of a given partition. Therefore, larger
partitions make for more VM space - is this sound reasoning?

Alan Thompson (with a 60 GB HD - a single primary partition)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Abdul Samad Abdul Razzak"
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Why would one want to partition a hard drive?


> 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"
> 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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