If you have a Windows laptop with a good sized hard disk drive like me, you may have opted for splitting your disk drive into a number of different partitions. When you partition your hard drive you are essentially creating a number of independent hard drives on your computer. So instead of a just a C: drive you can have a C: and D: drive and perhaps even more drives on your computer. These partitions act like completely separate disks but the main difference to actual separate hard disks is that partitions share their hardware (and therefore any potential failures so backup is still very important).

Now why would you want to partition your hard drive? Well there are a number of good reasons a few of which I have listed below;

- Separating and isolating specific files, to make it easier to recover or back up an important data set.
- Maintaining good computer performance, smaller file systems are generally more efficient. i.e. Having one huge C: drive will potentially slow a system down especially when full.
- For the geeks it provides the ability to have a number of different operating systems on the same computer. You could install Linux on one partition (so it doesn’t conflict with Windows) and have the choice of booting into Linux at power-up.
- Provides a high level means to organize data, you could have separate partitions dedicated to documents, music, photos, email etc.

Partitions are becoming more important as we all get larger and larger hard drives. I have a separate C: and D: drive. On the C: drive I have all the operating system files, program files etc., while on the D: drive I have all my data. One reason for this is that I can point my data backup up at just the D: drive and not include all the system files as well, making it more efficient.

So maybe you’re sold on partitions and want to create your own? Well the best program that I have found for this is the excellent and aptly named Partition Magic, which will allow you to create, merge and delete partitions to your hearts content. Always do a backup before though to be on the safe side.