How do I partition a Hard Drive and why should I do so?

[soarwitheagles]

Hi everyone!

I just finished my second home build and had some questions about partitioning my Hard Drives.

I have two Hard Drives:

Maxtor 320GB SATA
Maxtor 500GB SATA

Here are some of my questions:

I read in a post here that to improve performance, I should partition my HD's.

So I did that with my first HD. I partitioned it so that OS XP Pro would be on a 50GB partition. Then I could not find the rest of my HD!

Somehow I found a button that said format hard drive. I pushed that and Wa-La, now I see the other 249GB's listed as drive E I think.

Ok, can anyone tell me why it is best to partition the OS from the rest of the system?

Question 2: Should I partition the second HD. It is a 500GB and I will use it almost exclusively for music file storage and video editing.

Ok, those are my questions.

Can someone help me by educating me on these matters?

Thanks,

Not-So-Fast-Freddy

 

[DawnOfDoom]

For partitioning a drive you are creating 2 areas where you can store files on one hard drive its like deviding cake in half its still the same cake on the same platter its just cutup into pieces of your size choice. you can use this for sending your Paging files to to keep windows running fast like eric B explains in his thread of keeping windows running smoothly.

 

[mcovalt]

Dont store too much on your os partition. Store multimedia, programs, and what not on the blank partition. This prevents windows from having to sort through all of your junk in order to load necessary components. You only need to partition a little section for the os. Unless you are a neat freak. If so, you can have one partition dedicated to music, one to movies, one to pictures, and so on. That, however, is unnecessary.

 

[DawnOfDoom]

indeed but is very very needed if your have UBER amounts of files. such as a graphic designer tehy would probably have separate hard drives. but if your a minor at that then partitions should work otu fine for organizing your files.