My new computer has a 60 GB hard drive compared with my older computer’s 7 GB drive. I would like to partition this drive but have little knowledge on the theory behind partitioning. By this I mean not how to do the actual partitioning but, rather, why to partition, how many partitions are the optimum, which size(s) to give to each partition, what to put in each partition and why, etc’¦ Can you help?

The obvious reason to partition your hard drive is for organisation sake. If you have a hard drive with only one partition then it may be more difficult to organise data. While quite a few people argue this point, I don’t really agree, as using folders on a hard drive offers good enough organisation of data for my purposes. However, by separating your hard drive into partitions, your file fragmentation will not be as severe as if your whole hard drive is just one partition. If you have a 60 GB hard drive which is highly fragmented, it will slow down significantly. But, if you have many partitions then the degree of fragmentation on each partition is likely to be smaller, as you are not moving around files as much as if you had a single partition.

A more significant reason for partitioning is for the more efficient storage of data. Hard drives are organised into ‘clusters’. Each cluster is the smallest single amount of hard drive space which can be recognised by Windows. For example: if you are running Windows XP on an NTFS file system, with a 60 GB hard drive, which only has one single partition, the cluster size is 4 KB (4,096 bytes). This means, a text file which is only 16 bytes will take up 4 KB of space. You can see this by right-clicking on a file and selecting ‘Properties’. On the ‘General’ tab you will see ‘Size’ which is the actual size of the file (16 bytes), and ‘Size on disk’ which is how much disk space the file is occupying (4 KB). As you can see, this is a waste of space (if you are interested to see how bad it can get, particularly on a FAT file system, have a look at ‘The default cluster size for the NTFS and FAT file systems’ at support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=314878). If you have smaller hard drives (i.e., smaller partitions) then the cluster size is smaller. For example, if you separate your 60 GB partition into 60 x 1 GB partitions (which I don’t suggest you do, as that is a lot of partitions) the cluster size will only be 1 KB on each partition, so rather than your 16 byte file taking up 4 KB, it will only take up 1 KB. While this is still a waste, we have reduced the space consumption by 4 times. To be honest, if you have a large enough hard drive, then this space saving for small files isn’t that significant. I have a 120 GB hard drive on a single partition and I don’t lose any sleep knowing that I am losing a relatively small amount of space on my hard drive.

Therefore, the optimum amount of partitions will be subject to conjecture. By partitioning your 60 GB drive, unless you partition the drive into about 31 partitions, you will not gain any cluster size advantages (as the cluster size under NTFS for 2 GB and larger is the same, 4 KB). It wouldn’t be a good idea to make 31 partitions and things will get very messy organisationally. I would say 3 or 4 equally sized partitions would be good. Use one partition for your system and programs, another for documents, etc’¦ This will help limit fragmentation and also offer some degree of organisation on your computer.