Maybe.
Many experts think that splitting a single hard drive into two partitions improves speed, makes backups easier, and is generally the best thing since sliced bread.
I don’t think it adds a lot of benefit.
Partitioning that disk
Splitting your hard drive into two partitions sounds like a good idea, but it probably won’t help as much as you think. Most programs still need C: no matter what, and reformatting means reinstalling everything anyway. One partition per drive is simpler and works just as well.
About that “huge amount of speed”
I doubt that the partitioning got you any significant speed boost. When you reformat a computer, there are so many things that get cleaned up and improve speed. For example, simply installing and running less software initially can make a huge difference.
I’m not convinced the partitioning had much impact at all.
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What’s a Disk Partition?
Partitions allow a single physical disk drive to be treated as if it were multiple disks.#131019
Installing applications on a drive other than C:
Some programs allow you to specify where programs will be installed when you run setup. Some do not and can only be installed where they insist on being installed, typically the system drive, also known as C:.
For the ones that do allow you to specify an alternate drive, such as D:, many still install components on C: anyway. The installation destination you specify only controls some of the files.
Even those setups that copy all of their files to the location you specify still end up making changes to the system registry.
The C: drive – the system drive – is special. Important. And special.
Those applications on D: when you reformat C:
After reformatting and reinstalling Windows on C:, you’ll probably have to reinstall the applications you put on D: anyway.
When you reinstalled Windows, the information for each program in the system registry, as well as any other files they placed on C:, disappeared.
Installing applications to another drive buys you nothing when it comes time to reformat the system drive. The sole exceptions are what are called “portable” applications, which do not require running a setup program. (Most major applications are NOT portable, and those that have portable versions are pretty clear about their availability.)
If you had to run a setup program, you’ll probably need to reinstall the program when you reformat and reinstall Windows, regardless of where you installed the application.
One for all, all on one
My recommended approach remains using one partition per drive1.
Thus, I would not have partitioned your hard drive as you have. I’d have set up a single partition and reformatted and reinstalled to that.
If you’re just trying to organize your files, that’s what folders are meant for.
If you’re trying to make the next reformat/reinstall faster – well, by now, you can see that you haven’t really. The best way to do that is to wait until after you’ve installed the system and your major applications, and take a full system backup image. When the time comes to start over, use that image.
If you’re trying to make backups easier, you’ll want to back up your data and installed applications anyway, so even if you have two partitions, you’ll need to back up both. A single partition means you’ll back up everything in a single operation.
One exception
If you have a lot of data — not software, not programs, but data files such as videos, documents, mp3s, whatever — it can be useful to place them on a separate drive or partition. That way, when you reformat your system partition (or restore it from a system image), you can leave the other drive or partition untouched and preserve the data there.
You can use a second partition, if you like.
My recommendation in this situation? Go for that second internal hard drive. If you’ve got that much data, this is one approach that could make for a noticeable speed increase.
Do this
Unless you have a large amount of data that you might place on a second partition or hard drive, leave your single drive as a single partition, and back it up regularly.
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Footnotes & References
1: Except for the system restore, recovery, and UEFI partitions on your primary drive, which are administrative partitions you don’t normally see.
One consideration re. this statement:
“My recommendation in this situation? Go for that second internal hard drive. If you’ve got that much data, this is one approach that could make for a noticeable speed increase.”
For a Desktop unit it may be possible to install more than 1 x hard drive – but not so for a Laptop. I am a great fan of keeping User Data in a completely separate partition to the Operating System + Applications, precisely because the latter can undergo a clean install without impacting the data. (Backups also essential, of course.)
With a Desktop, the User Data partition could be on a completely separate hard drive, but for laptop users there is no choice but to partition the single hard drive. (And by hard drive I mean solid-state storage as well as legacy mechanical storage.)
On any computer, but for laptops in particular, you’ll get the best performance by setting up cloud storage, and synchronizing it with your data folders on Windows, not to mention the bonus security of having a copy of your data off premise. That’s one of the reasons I use Mega.nz’s cloud storage. With my free account, I get 20GB storage that I use to synchronize seven folders on my computer to the cloud, and when I need to clean install Windows, reclaiming my data is a simple process of installing the MEGAsync desktop app and using it to sign into my account’s cloud space, and configure the synchronization of the seven drives I keep there so my files are returned to my computer.. It doesn’t usually take much longer than the first Windows update I perform after getting Windows installed. Additionally, Mega.nz also has very competitively priced options for more storage if you need it.
Ernie
20 GB is a lot of storage, but it’s probably not enough for most people. If you need more, you can use multiple sync services and believe it ot not, you might not even notice a hit to your bandwidth as the only significant bandwidth is used when they are uploading and downloading. Otherwise, the only use milliseconds to poll whether changes need to be synced.
Here are a few of the most popular services which have free tiers. There are more.
Mega.nz – 20GB
Google Drive – 15 GB.
Microsoft OneDrive – 5 GB
Dropbox – 2 GB B(upgradeable by getting friends to sign up. I have 23 GB)
Apple iCloud – 5 GB
Mega – 20 GB
pCloud – 10 GB
I find I have a lot of temporary files. These are usually documents or photos that have been emailed to me to review or modify, downloaded maps or articles, app installation files, etc., all for temporary use. I might need to refer to these files over a few days or weeks, but they have no intrinsic value to me; if I lost any/all, I would ask the sender to resend or download a fresh copy from the original site.
I therefore have split a partition into D and T (AKA “temp”). I use D for my own data and T for the other files. My backup program now only needs to run against D and need not backup T. I can’t be bothered to delete the T files until it starts to run out of space.
Leo always has good and practical advice.
I personally have partitioned my single SSD drive into a large C drive and a smaller D drive.
I placed my Documents and Downloads folders into the D drive and of course I arranged my PC to always look into these 2 new locations. This is easy to do and the how to do info is readily available on the Internet. This is easy and fast to do.
My reasons are to make it easier or me for re-installing Windows when catastrophe happens as now all my needed files are safe and ready to be used again faster and much easier. Of course I have to inform my new Windows about the new Documents and Downloads location which is very easy and very fast to do.
Of course I also do backups and I use Macrium Reflect program to stay safe and secure.
When my PC is fortunate to have more than one disk drive then I use my second drive for Documents and Downloads.
These methods facilitates my life and keeps me up to date simpler and much faster.
It’s true that with one partition you still have to back up your user folders (something I do regularly, and especially before restoring an image), but with two partitions I only have to restore user files if the image restore fails AND destroys my D partition. In all the years, and all the systems I have set up, I have never had a failure that affected D other than a catastrophic drive failure.
Backing up my user files (effectively everything on D) consists of a single robocopy command. Doing the same for a single partition means multiple robocopy commands for the various user folders.
After many years of maintaining windows laptops for myself, family, and friends, I have never had cause to regret this system. On my laptop with a 1 TB SSD I am partitioned as 130 GB C and 820 GB D. Most users would not require such a large C partition but I do a lot of programming and video/audio work which eats up more disk space than usual.
My Lenovo Legion 5 15IMH05 laptop came with the 60Wh battery so it’s equipped with two M.2 slots, the first of which contains a 512 GB NVMe M.2 drive, and the second of which occupies the same space as a SATA port, both of which are currently empty, and only one of the two can be used at any given time. I’ve been considering getting a 1TB M.2 drive to increase available storage space, and if I do, I’ll probably set up the new drive with two ~512 GB partitions, one for Windows (NTFS) and the other for my Garuda Linux installation (Btrfs) so in Windows I can move my default Windows folders to the secondary drive making more space available on C:. Then in Garuda Linux, I’ll take the steps to move my user space (/home) to the secondary drive to create more space on the root (/) partition there too. My reason for all this is to make more space on the system partitions for both OSes without having to start fresh with everything, as well as that it’s the best way I can think of to continue allocating equal storage to both OSes.
In so far as I agree with Leo that having a second partition doesn’t normally have a significant effect on performance, when the system partition becomes too filled up, performance is affected, so in that case, an additional partition on a second drive can have a significant effect on both performance and reliability, provided it’s used to free up space on the system partition(s).
Ernie
I am a retired trainer and engineer with about 40 years working with MS Windows and Office.
Back before network or cloud storage was de rigeur, it was very common for computers to have the data stored locally, and that is still the case for many smaller businesses and personal users. Many computers for corporates used imaged files to update the OS and apps for their client computers, so it was easier and faster for them to simply refresh an image of the partition. We did the same thing with our training computers that were often refreshed daily via automated files. By having the data in its own partition it could remain untouched during these processes.
I have had this happen on a couple of occasions when OS corruptions have occurred, and to a friend who (despite my warnings) did not clean their system of temp files, update files etc. and and literally choked their C: drive to the point it could not boot during an Adobe update. They had not recently done a data back up, so I used the recovery drive to format the C: partition and install a clean OS and apps, with the data on D: not impacted
It reaps benefits for users not using image builds because if the OS suffers a major corruption and will not boot, one can use a recovery disk to rebuild the partition cleanly and quickly, a process far less complicated and faster if one does not have to also load data files. This is a common configuration:
C: Windows boot, plus installed applications
D: Data: data of all kinds, plus drivers and the install files for my critical apps that cannot be installed from the web.
I have also found it convenient when upsizing the physical drives. On several systems, the drive space has become an issue, so I have used DiskGenius to clone the two partitions to my new physical drive – the program allows me to stretch partition sizes to make use of my larger physical drives with ease.
As regards speed… I find it more efficient to remove WIndows bloatware, clean redundant files like old backups and temp files – MS Disk Cleanup (part of Windows) does that OK, and shrink cached memory – MemoryMap does that quite well.
So, in summary, it’s not about speed but, much like a ship has watertight compartments, isolating data. I still keep data backups on USB hard disks as well, often reusing older ones harvested from my PC upgrades.
When I have to re-image my PC it replaces the entire drive not just one partition. How do you set it up to re-image just one partition, leaving the others intact?
Depends on the tool you’re using, but most allow you to specify individual partitions.
My D: drive is 2 TB, but I had some old software that did not recognize a drive larger than 1 TB. So I split the drive into 2 partitions of 1 TB each.