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As you probably know a hard drive is to be split into
one or more partitions, since it cannot hold data until it is carved up
and space is set aside for the operating system. Until recently most PCs
used to have just one partition, which filled the entire hard disk and
contained the OS. The situation has changed however, thanks to new cost-effective
high capacity hard drives, thus opening up numerous possibilities for
PC users, such as editing video, archiving music, backing up CD images,
etc. Huge increase in space is great, but it poses a number of problems,
most important of which are effective data organization and speed.
Large drives are always going to take longer to search
than smaller volumes, and an operating system is going to have its work
cut out both finding and organizing files. It is for this reason that
many people decide to invest in multiple hard drives, but there is an
easy solution – drive partitioning. Drive partitioning lets you divide a single
physical drive into a number of logical drives, each of which servers
as a container with its own drive letter and volume label, thus enabling
the operating system to process data more efficiently. Besides drive partitioning
makes it possible to organize data so that it is easy to find and manage.
You can set aside, for instance, 40 GB of a 160 GB hard drive for the
OS, 70 GB for storing video and another 50 GB for your favorite music
collections to provide transparent data storage.
It is also worth mentioning to that with a hard drive
properly partitioned, such routine operations as files defragmentation
or consistency check will not be that annoying and time-consuming any
more.
By detaching the OS from the rest of the data you can
tackle one more crucial issue – in case of a system malfunction, you can
get the system back on track in minutes by recovering it from a backup
image located on the other partition of the hard drive.
But that is not all drive partitioning may be used
for. If you are willing to play games in Windows while browsing the Internet
in Linux, 100-percent sure that no virus will attack your PC, drive partitioning
is a necessity. In order to run several OSs on a single hard drive you
are to create a corresponding number of partitions to effectively delineate
the boundaries of each OS.
All of the above-mentioned drive partitioning applications
are implemented in the program. And all the necessary actions are performed
by using the system of convenient wizards. This means that the user simply
has to follow easy step-by-step instructions to make the appropriate settings.
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