# Is using an hdd without partition OK?



## stumped3r (Sep 12, 2016)

I have only one 1TB hdd and now I have only one drive due to some wrong operation of last time reinstalling.

What I want to know is that is it really necessary to do some partitions? If I keep using my only hdd as a whole drive without any partition for a very long time, will it slow my system? And what's your opinions on partition?


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## rtwjunkie (Sep 12, 2016)

Partitioning is not necessary, and can actually slow down your drive.  I will suggest that you get another drive soon and keep your irreplaceable data/photos/etc onto there as soon as possible.  And also make sure you have a backup plan for it.

Just regularly use drive cleanup for junk, occasionally defrag your HDD, and you should be fine for speed.


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## Ungari (Sep 12, 2016)

Using an HDD without permission is just plain wrong!
Always get permission to use an HDD.


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## stumped3r (Sep 12, 2016)

Ungari said:


> Using an HDD without permission is just plain wrong!
> Always get permission to use an HDD.


what does your "permission" mean?


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## NdMk2o1o (Sep 12, 2016)

Ungari said:


> Using an HDD without permission is just plain wrong!
> Always get permission to use an HDD.



Either trying to be funny or can't read... 

There's no need to partition your drive, it's a personal choice... But get another drive or back up your data that you can't afford to lose cause a single drive is a single point of failure if it does die on you.


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## newtekie1 (Sep 12, 2016)

I never partition any of my drives.


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## stumped3r (Sep 12, 2016)

thanks guys, i'll use my portable hard drive back up important stuffs.


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## Flow (Sep 12, 2016)

Your drive already has a partition, or else it would be "raw"and unusable. It's where your data and/or operating system sits.
But yes, better to get another drive for backup.


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## natr0n (Sep 12, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> I never partition any of my drives.



+1


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## RejZoR (Sep 12, 2016)

Well, you need at least 1 partition. Drive without partition is RAW drive that can't be used at all


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## lorraine walsh (Sep 16, 2016)

Definitely partition. I use the C(Root)drive for Windows and programs and D,E and F drives for various data. With this setup, if you have an unrecoverable crash you can just reformat and reinstall Windows and lose none of your data. If you just have the C drive and are not particularly computer savvy you are likely to lose all your data.


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## FordGT90Concept (Sep 16, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> I never partition any of my drives.


This.  The only partitions I have are required by EFI/GPT/MBR.  Said differently, my drivers only have one letter.


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## Jetster (Sep 16, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> I never partition any of my drives.


You have to have at least one partition (the active one). Otherwise its a raw drive

But no problem you can use the whole drive for your system. Single partition  It wont slow anything down

It actually is going to have two partitions The System Reserved 100/250Mb and the Active partition

Now people uasally learn about how to add a partition and go fn crazy. You don't need a bunch of partitions. But keeping your data separate from your system is a good idea in case of a system failure and you can only afford one drive. Then you can delete the system and reinstall while not touching your data


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## FYFI13 (Sep 16, 2016)

Hard to believe how many people here think they're using unpartitioned hard/solid state drives


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## Jetster (Sep 16, 2016)

FYFI13 said:


> Hard to believe how many people here think they're using unpartitioned hard/solid state drives



Not really, its a confusing word.


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## Frick (Sep 16, 2016)

Jetster said:


> Not really, its a confusing word.



No it isn't. The OP means a second partition.

Anyway, I like to have two partitions if I have a single drive.


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## Komshija (Sep 16, 2016)

"Whole" drive usually means one partition with the same size as total HDD capacity. Even if you are using it as a system drive, where system creates unmarked 100-500 MB partition which is not user-accessible, you'll still have one partition.


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## qubit (Sep 16, 2016)

Partitions are very useful indeed and this is how I've partitioned my drives:

SSD: two equal partitions with Windows 10 on the first one. The second partition is formatted and used for scratchpad / temporary use, such as moving a Steam game with long loading times that I'm currently playing, to it. There's actually a small third, system reserved partition that W10 created, of course.

HDD: this is not a boot drive and has four partitions as follows: Steam games, Origin games, general data and music. The general data and music partitions are backed up regularly using Karen's Replicator. I don't back up the Windows partition as it's not so difficult to reinstall Windows should it break and a backup would take a lot of space.

See specs for hardware details.


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## stumped3r (Sep 16, 2016)

Frick said:


> No it isn't. The OP means a second partition.
> 
> Anyway, I like to have two partitions if I have a single drive.


I'm not a good English speaker so my words maybe not accurate.
Thanks for understanding.


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## newtekie1 (Sep 16, 2016)

Jetster said:


> You have to have at least one partition (the active one). Otherwise its a raw drive





FYFI13 said:


> Hard to believe how many people here think they're using unpartitioned hard/solid state drives



In the tech industry, when partition is used as a verb, it means to divide the drive up into multiple usable partitions. In all of my training, this is always what it means. The A+, MCSE, etc. all do this.

I'm fully aware that there must be are least one partition on the drive if you want to use it.

Also, an unformatted partition is raw. A drive with no partitions is uninitialized. Once you initialize the drive, and decide what type of partition table it will use(usually MBR or GPT in Windows), the drive already has one large partition. That "unallocated" space is a partition in the partition table.


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## NdMk2o1o (Sep 16, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> In the tech industry, when partition is used as a verb, it means to divide the drive up into multiple usable partitions. In all of my training, this is always what it means. The A+, MCSE, etc. all do this.
> 
> I'm fully aware that there must be are least one partition on the drive if you want to use it.
> 
> Also, an unformatted partition is raw. A drive with no partitions is uninitialized. Once you initialize the drive, and decide what type of partition table it will use(usually MBR or GPT in Windows), the drive already has one large partition. That "unalocated" space is a partition in the partition table.



Glad you said it, quite frankly fed up of seeing people post the same thing about it like they know something we don't... The op was blatantly talking about partitioning the drive after installing Windows and nothing to do with partitioning a raw drive or the goddam system reserved partition  /rant


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## Mussels (Sep 16, 2016)

I always have two partitions on my windows drive, just to make reinstall easier.

a 100GB C: partition is a lot easier to wipe and reinstall an OS, than a 1TB+ - moreso when your files are already safe on the D: partition.


More than two partitions, or on secondary drives - no, i don't think its worth it.


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## Jetster (Sep 16, 2016)

I rather have separate drives than multiple partitions


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## Nabarun (Sep 16, 2016)

FordGT90Concept said:


> This.  The only partitions I have are required by EFI/GPT/MBR.  Said differently, my drivers only have one letter.


Then you have 2 partitions. 1 unusable as a drive.



Jetster said:


> You have to have at least one partition (the active one). Otherwise its a raw drive
> 
> But no problem you can use the whole drive for your system. Single partition  It wont slow anything down
> 
> ...


No, it's not GOING to have that unnecessary waste of a partition if you partition your drive BEFORE starting the windows setup from cd/usb etc and prevent it from creating that by creating 4 primary partitions. You can use a Linux CD or any other boot medium to partition the drive and THEN start installing windows from your preferred source. After the installation, if you don't want the extra drives then you can just delete them. I used to have multi-boot configuration in my computers long ago when virtualbox wasn't so evolved and running multi OSes was too much for the system resources. And the Extra partition that windows setup ate up was a bit of a nuisance. Multi-boot and access to the bare-bone hardware is still a very viable option for many, for tasting the "actual" power of many OSes and to do stuff which aren't quite as good "virtually" or just might not work at all.


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## eidairaman1 (Sep 16, 2016)

rtwjunkie said:


> Partitioning is not necessary, and can actually slow down your drive.  I will suggest that you get another drive soon and keep your irreplaceable data/photos/etc onto there as soon as possible.  And also make sure you have a backup plan for it.
> 
> Just regularly use drive cleanup for junk, occasionally defrag your HDD, and you should be fine for speed.



Yup partitions slow it all down because the platters and heads would have to move from 1 to the other. 1 partition per drive is a must.

I honestly feel SSDs have dropped in price that it would be a cheap upgrade.
I have the swap space/paging file set to 4096 MB- max allowed so it doesn"t waste any space and those programs that use it have plenty. My HDD is a velociraptor 1tb for games and downloads.


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## FordGT90Concept (Sep 16, 2016)

Nabarun said:


> Then you have 2 partitions. 1 unusable as a drive.


Actually 3:
1) Recovery Partition (450 MiB)
2) EFI System (100 MiB)
3) boot, pagefile, crash dump, primary partition (476.39 GiB)

Windows always creates the Recovery Partition although I'm not entirely sure why.


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## Nabarun (Sep 16, 2016)

FordGT90Concept said:


> Actually 3:
> 1) Recovery Partition (450 MiB)
> 2) EFI System (100 MiB)
> 3) boot, pagefile, crash dump, primary partition (476.39 GiB)
> ...


I don't have any of those extra partitions. I needed them for other OSes (now I use VBox) so I didn't let windows do it.


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## Jetster (Sep 17, 2016)

Nabarun said:


> I don't have any of those extra partitions. I needed them for other OSes (now I use VBox) so I didn't let windows do it.
> View attachment 78890



That's fine if they are a nuisance for you but there is no need to remove them. I could see how a linux user would be annoyed but them. But we are way past the OP on the question at hand. Obviously we all have our own opinion about partitions.


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## slozomby (Sep 17, 2016)

Nabarun said:


> I don't have any of those extra partitions. I needed them for other OSes (now I use VBox) so I didn't let windows do it.
> View attachment 78890



bleh, making drive letter for pics/media/stuff....   isolating pics from movies is what folders are for

carving off data space is one thing. carving up data space into tiny little chunks is nuts.   when i have single drive systems ( with a single os) i'd carve out a d: drive for my docs and pics and whatnot.

my desktop looks like this
c: windows and apps (Physical drive ( ssd) )
d: games ( physical drive ( ssd) )
e: everything else (huge raid set )

and d: isnt really necessary but i had a spare ssd so figured i'd put it to use. otherwise it'd just be a part of E:


the only useful thing carving the disks up into tiny chunks does is prevent you from eating all the space with one type of file. this is useful when you have things that autogrow like log files or tempdb ( sql) or  that way if the log partition fills it wont affect the rest of the system. but user data changes and grows. i have 100gb of mp3's ( give or take) it slowly grows why cap myself at 110gb for no reason.

now tons of drive letters due to lots of different physical drives is a different senario. there you might be seeking performance gains by having different spindles do different tasks. or you could just have inherited tons of smaller drives.

Servers get mutliple partitions because multiple paths to the san help with io and giving each database its own partition makes it far easier to move it around between machine clusters. but that. if you want to discuss how to effectively optimize your san for SQL clusters i'll happily take that to pms. 



Jetster said:


> That's fine if they are a nuisance for you but there is no need to remove them. I could see how a linux user would be annoyed but them. But we are way past the OP on the question at hand. Obviously we all have our own opinion about partitions.



even on linux.
/
/boot
/home
/var/log
swap
/opt/appdata( insert app name here)
what else do you need

no need for /home/username/pictures and /home/username/movies as separate partitions


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## FordGT90Concept (Sep 17, 2016)

Nabarun said:


> I don't have any of those extra partitions. I needed them for other OSes (now I use VBox) so I didn't let windows do it.
> View attachment 78890


Clearly not EFI.  It's with the introduction of GPT and EFI that the extra two hidden partitions are created.  EFI refuses to boot without the EFI partition.


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## Nabarun (Sep 17, 2016)

slozomby said:


> bleh, making drive letter for pics/media/stuff....   isolating pics from movies is what folders are for
> 
> carving off data space is one thing. carving up data space into tiny little chunks is nuts.   when i have single drive systems ( with a single os) i'd carve out a d: drive for my docs and pics and whatnot.
> 
> ...



Dude, you are describing what you think YOU need and what YOU don't. I had different things in mind when I thought multiple partitions would suit me better. I don't have a RAID array or even another working HDD atm. So in the event of a HDD crash, it is easier and less time-consuming to scan and recover data from smaller drives than from a single huge drive. If I had my personal photos and videos in the same drive as downloaded videos, I'd have to scan/recover/restore EVERYTHING in that drive and then filter out stuff. I don't think that's a smart thing to do. As far as performance aspect goes, a mechanical HDD won't get the speed of an SSD whichever way you partition it. The benefits in terms of speed are ... meh... at best. Besides, it suits me to organize different things in different drives when there can be hundreds of folders in each drive. Same applies to the Linux reference you made. And /home/username/pictures and /home/username/movies would be on the same drive in different directories - not partitions.



FordGT90Concept said:


> Clearly not EFI.  It's with the introduction of GPT and EFI that the extra two hidden partitions are created.  EFI refuses to boot without the EFI partition.


Yeah, windows needs that, unlike other OSes.


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## FordGT90Concept (Sep 17, 2016)

Linux requires EFI System too.  It's mandatory for EFI.  EFI applications are installed there so unless you use a lot of them, doesn't have to be very big.


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## FYFI13 (Sep 18, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> In the tech industry, when partition is used as a verb, it means to divide the drive up into multiple usable partitions. In all of my training, this is always what it means. The A+, MCSE, etc. all do this.
> 
> I'm fully aware that there must be are least one partition on the drive if you want to use it.
> 
> Also, an unformatted partition is raw. A drive with no partitions is uninitialized. Once you initialize the drive, and decide what type of partition table it will use(usually MBR or GPT in Windows), the drive already has one large partition. That "unallocated" space is a partition in the partition table.


Correct, although most pre-built PCs and laptops already comes with at least 4 partitions which makes OPs question technically wrong


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## newtekie1 (Sep 18, 2016)

FordGT90Concept said:


> Clearly not EFI.  It's with the introduction of GPT and EFI that the extra two hidden partitions are created.  EFI refuses to boot without the EFI partition.



How do USB drive boot in UEFI then without the EFI partition, they just have a EFI folder?


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## verycharbroiled (Sep 18, 2016)

for my single drive machines (like laptops) i will make 2 partitions (besides whatever the OS makes). one for the OS, one for data. reason is it makes it easier for OS reinstalls, and its easier to backup to the same machine. like backup the OS partition to the data partition. or backup just the data partition to somewhere else.


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## FordGT90Concept (Sep 19, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> How do USB drive boot in UEFI then without the EFI partition, they just have a EFI folder?


Because it's required by UEFI to launch into an operating system (a setup environment can forego it):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_system_partition


> When a computer is powered up and booted, UEFI firmware loads files stored on the ESP to start installed operating systems and various utilities.
> 
> ESP contains the boot loaders or kernel images for all installed operating systems (which are contained in other partitions on the same or any other local storage device), device driver files for hardware devices present in a computer and used by the firmware at boot time, system utility programs that are intended to be run before an operating system is booted, and data files such as error logs.


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## d265f2785 (Oct 17, 2016)

It's not true that you need at least one partition on every drive. There are file systems out there that will happily use an entire block device without partitioning it first. Now it's true that with uefi booting from such a drive would be problematic, but you can format a drive with btrfs (for example) directly, without any partition table. You can't (easily) boot from it but it will work just fine as a storage drive.


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## Steevo (Oct 17, 2016)

d265f2785 said:


> It's not true that you need at least one partition on every drive. There are file systems out there that will happily use an entire block device without partitioning it first. Now it's true that with uefi booting from such a drive would be problematic, but you can format a drive with btrfs (for example) directly, without any partition table. You can't (easily) boot from it but it will work just fine as a storage drive.



You are talking power user, and OP is talking end user. One of these things is not like the other. 

OP


No, no additional partitions beyond what the operating system creates are required.

1) Many users create additional partitions to keep files separated for their needs or desires, but they are unneeded.
2) Creating multiple partitions on a single hard drive is detrimental to overall performance.
3) On SSD's (Solid State Drives) the modern version of hard drives with no moving parts, it makes no performance difference to create multiple partitions, but you will use up more storage space for each partition in general than if left as one large partition.
4) If you decide later to add an additional partition Windows can do this for you without much effort, or loss of any data.


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## slozomby (Oct 17, 2016)

Steevo said:


> 2) Creating multiple partitions on a single hard drive is detrimental to overall performance.


 nope. performance on a platter will be the same regardless of how many partitions it has. throughput will change based on position of data on the drive independent of how many partitions exist.



Steevo said:


> 3) On SSD's (Solid State Drives) the modern version of hard drives with no moving parts, it makes no performance difference to create multiple partitions, but you will use up more storage space for each partition in general than if left as one large partition.


yeah a couple of MB. its not like you're losing a significant% of the drive. 



Steevo said:


> 4) If you decide later to add an additional partition Windows can do this for you without much effort, or loss of any data.


yes you can shrink and add a partition. however if the data you want to move exceeds the free space on the drive you'll have to juggle. the same is true for removing a partition


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## d265f2785 (Oct 17, 2016)

Steevo said:


> You are talking power user, and OP is talking end user. One of these things is not like the other.
> 
> OP
> 
> ...


You're right. If you have to ask then the answer is just put in the os install disk and let it partition the drive the way it wants. If you know what you are doing you can fiddle with the settings and if you really know what you are doing you might get some more performance for your use scenario, but for most people the os (Windows/Linux/OsX/*BSD/....) will partition the drive just fine on it's own and changing things just for the sake of it will likely lead to lower performance. The people who wrote the os installer knew what they were doing and unless you have a specific and justifiable reason for changing the defaults leave them alone.


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## wildgoose (Nov 1, 2016)

If you only have one physical disk, have at least 2 partitions on it can be quite beneficial. You can use one for the OS, and use the other for data (and/or for portable programs that don't require an installer). This allows you to easily install the OS from scratch (by re-format c drive) without disturb your data partition. You can also cleanly image the OS/Data partition separately.

I do this for Windows, Linux, and Mac, and has served me well for many years with multiple OS upgrades that are clean install. Many of the programs I use are portable (or can be made Portable via software such as VMware ThinApp), so after a fresh OS install, these apps can be run directly.

This is much more difficult with only one partition. If you want to install from scratch, you'll have to backup all your data elsewhere, format the drive, then install, and copy data back. Much more troublesome, and likely won't be done. So the OS install will be an upgrade, with all the crap that it has accumulated previously.

Of course, having a data partition is no substitute for backup.


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## Drone (Nov 1, 2016)

I have two partitions and never noticed any slowdown, it's actually even better like that. Stuff I don't use quite often is on that partition so Windows won't index/shadow copy that whenever it wants. And it's easier to defrag it that way.


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## Mussels (Nov 1, 2016)

having games on a second partition/drive helps prevent them getting fragmented, as your frequent small writes are done to the C: drive.


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