Opinions on partitions for storage drive (external)

The default would be to leave an external storage drive, of a few TB, one large NTFS partition.

In terms of organization, performance, etc, it's a non-issue, and no system files. Is there any reason to have any more than one partition under those circumstances?

The one possibility I can envision would be in case of file system corruption during connection, should the connection fail (such as offloading data from a laptop with a loose USB connection). In such a case, the whole drive might not be corrupted, just the one partition. Not sure how common that is, though, with NTFS.

Just getting some opinions before formatting.

 

Have a read here as it seems to explain what you wanted to know.
https://www.easeus.com/partition-master/free-partition-external-hard-drive-windows-10.html

 

Well there's no hard & fast rule to create or not to create partitions on hard disks specially external hard disks. Just go what you think works for you. I always create minimum of 2 partitions on internal HDD - one for OS & other for data so that I can reimage/reinstall Windows in case of problem without affecting the data. On external HDDs I don't create any partition - not even on my 6TB external NAS.

 

Thanks. In the old days, I liked to have at least 3 partitions, when it was just one system drive. One for the OS, for the reasons you stated, one small-sh one for temporary files (which I wanted to keep low, so it was faster) because temp files got very fragmented and scattered, and then the third for program and project/storage files. In fact, I sometimes made 4 partitions, the third being as described for the program and active files, and the fourth for larger files I didn't access often (which didn't tend to get as fragmented).

Of course times have changed, and things are different with an external.

As I mentioned, my only real fear is if I were offloading files from an older laptop with a loose USB, I don't want a bad connection to contaminate any more than the files in question. I've heard of an entire FAT file system getting hosed that way. I've not heard of that happening with NTFS, though.

 

Your files on external HDD are only in problem when you are writing. In case of reading, there would be very less probability of anything going wrong & if anything goes wrong, I think it would affect the whole hard disk & not just a partition as the external HDD normally also takes power through the USB port only.
I could be wrong though.

 

I used to create multiple partitions, I don't any more. I use multiple drives and folders. And I only use SSDs.

I have a 256GB SSD for the OS and my apps, and a large secondary SSD for "Backups and Stuff".

I have found using folders is just as easy as using partitions. And I note partition tables can become corrupted too.

 

For? No. Dividing up the hard drive into multiple partitions adds a little more complexity to the drive management tables. Typically, the more complex something is, the more things there are that can go wrong.

Modern versions of Windows that use the NTFS file system by default already do a great job of optimizing our drives for speed and space. When you partition a drive into smaller sections, you restrict the size of each partition. Depending on how the drive is used, your OS or one of your applications could start getting out-of-disk-space errors even though you may still have 100s of GBs available. But because it is on another partition, it it unavailable.

When we partition a drive, we really have no way of predicting what our space requirements "will" be for each partition 2 years down the road. We have to guess. And if we guess wrong, we may have to resize our partitions - introducing even more possibilities for something to go wrong.

If the drive is one big partition, the entire drive is always available.

To be sure, I am not against partitions either. I just don't see any advantage for them any more - at least not for me. With folders, I can keep my drives organized easily. I always have the entire drive available. Since Windows, by default, keeps our hard drives defragged, partitioning does not improve performance. I don't have to worry about drive letters shifting. Scheduling backups is easier because I just backup the drive instead of needing to schedule each partition separately.

Some used to think partitioning improved performance. That really was never true and that's because there's still only one R/W head. If the OS was put on one partition, the applications on another, and the data stored on a third, that single R/W head was constantly jumping back and forth, back and forth across the disk. That can actually degrade performance. With one big drive, there is still jumping back and forth, but the physical separations between those data storage locations may be much less, thus improving access times.

With partitions, when writing to the drive, for example, instead of simply stepping to and saving (writing) the data to the adjacent disk sector, the R/W head first had to jump - perhaps across the entire drive - to the applicable partition, then find the next available sector before it could start writing to the disk.

Also if you have two physical drives instead of two partitions, operating systems are smart enough to access both drives simultaneously and read/write application data and user data on both drives at the same time - thus speeding up the process.

With SSDs, that jumping back and forth is not an issue, of course. But limiting disk space, instead of always having the full drive available, sure is. And while SSDs are clearly significantly faster, operating systems are still able to access data on separate drives simultaneously (thus more quickly) vs sequentially on a partitioned SSD.

Then there's price. Consumers have a wide variety of affordable options these days, including over a dozen 1TB SSDs from Newegg for $100 or less.

 

As I said, my solution is to use folders.

As far as using separate partitions so you can backup the boot partition to the secondary partition, that's fine if the boot partition or OS becomes corrupted. But if the drive fails, the secondary partition and that backup are useless.

 

Smart!

 

I backup my partitions to both a separate (internal) hard disk & a NAS on another floor. Just in case. And most of my data is on OneDrive.

 

Yeah, it's funny how everyone knows they should back up their data, but so many don't worry about it - until its too late.

Then there are many who do backup their data, but they only have one backup and often that backup is on another drive in the same computer or to an external drive right next to the computer - a place where the backup will suffer the same fate as the original data should there be a fire, flood, tornado/hurricane, burglar theft, etc.

A good backup first and foremost, must be used. And second, it needs to involve multiple backups, preferably with at least one copy kept off site. I keep a copy of my most important business and tax records on a drive in my bank safe deposit box. I don't yet trust the cloud. I trust my data would never get lost because I suspect there would be more copies out there than I could count. But I don't trust the administrators of those cloud networks to do their jobs properly and keep our data secured from hackers who want to steal it.

 

The same thing with internal and external ones, but as a cloud storage I prefer MEGA.