At one point in time (before the introduction of SSDs) I was passionately opposed to the multi-partitioning ("short stroking") of one's HDD based on the theory that superior performance could be gained as a result. Yes, I heard the "theorists" time & time again point out the advantages of doing so based on the architecture & structure of HDDs. But working with hundreds of different makes/models of HDDs over the years and a myriad of PC systems I never found any practical truth to the supposed advantages of multi-partitioning from a performance point of view. I could never find any significant difference whatsoever when accessing, copying/moving, writing data to a HDD regardless of whether the HDD was single or multi-partitioned.
It always seemed to me that multi-partitioning one's HDD introduces a degree of added complexity that serves no useful purpose as well as causing problems down the road when this or that partition needed to be increased (or decreased) in disk-space capacity and the partitioning scheme becomes the stumbling block that prevents the user from doing so. We've run into those problems time & time again with multi-partitioned schemes.
Then there are the proponents of multi-partitioning who insist the result will be better organization of one's programs/data. With a few rare - very rare exceptions I never found the organizational complexity of multi-partitioning one's drive was superior to a user's simple expedient of creating directories/folders on a drive's single partition. Admittedly there are situations where one can make a valid case for multi-partitioning one's HDD (or SSD) for some presumed organizational advantage. One example might be where the PC user is using a substantial portion of his/her PC specifically for work-related data, e.g., reports, directives, statistical data, correspondence, etc., all of which have little or no relationship to the user's other PC data. One could make a valid case for creating a partition on one's drive to house that sort of specialized data especially if there might be some future incentive or possibility that the partition will be cloned to another drive or some other destination media. But in my experience those situations are few & far between for the overwhelming number of PC users.
However I have somewhat mellowed over the years with respect to this subject. Especially since the advent of SSDs. For clarity's sake I'll use this more-or-less typical example...
Let's say the user is working with a fairly large-capacity HDD, perhaps 1 TB or more. The user has created a typical single partition on the drive which houses his/her Windows OS together with all their other programs & data. By & by the time arrives when the user realizes the desirability of employing a SSD as their boot drive (just peruse the daily posts on Tom's Hardware Forum). But many - perhaps a sizable majority - of users simply can't afford a large-capacity SSD that they can use to contain the cloned total contents of their current HDD boot drive because of the single partition's intermingling of the OS & program data.
So what we've been advising users to do when they're originally setting up their large-capacity HDD, e.g., your 1 TB HDD, is to multi-partition the drive and use one of the partitions to contain the OS and another partition to contain the remainder of their data - programs & such. Then, if & when they purchase a SSD intended as their boot drive it will be a simple & relatively painless task to clone their source drive's boot partition over to a smaller capacity SSD that they can afford. They can then delete the Windows OS files/folders from the now secondary HDD and the remainder of its data, programs & such, will be immediately accessible & functional.
Now I recognize my advice might not always be appropriate for a PC user who is wedded to a laptop/notebook since in nearly all cases the computer would be operating with only a single drive and the user might never consider working with multiple drives. But even there no harm would occur if the large-capacity single boot drive is multi-partitioned with a smaller partition to contain only the OS & associated data.
Yippee! We've finally found a valid reason for multi-partitioning one's drive.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram