Disaster-Proof Your PC
Step 2: Hard Drive Partitioning (and Multiple Drives) Western Digital's WD Raptor Given the capacity of today's hard drives, partitioning is more practical than it was when 40GB was considered spacious. Unfortunately, most PC vendors still ship their systems with one huge partition the size of the hard drive itself - 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and even 1TB! To borrow a phrase from the film Galaxy Quest, "Oh, that's just not right!" Why? Drives this capacious beg to be partitioned for good, common-sense reasons. Partitioning a hard drive makes the operating system think that there are multiple, and separate hard drives installed. Specifically, this gives you the ability to store programs and data separately, easing backup and restoration duties, enhancing security and to provide a handy location for storing drive images, a key component in disaster recovery. When building your own PC, you have an advantage: partition the hard drive before installing the OS and decide for yourself what goes where. With a preconfigured system, it's a bit more troublesome. While normal practice for system builders is to include a hidden partition for disaster recovery (or include a system recovery disc), this only enables the end user to restore a PC to its day-one status. All customization is lost (user-installed software, system tweaks and removal of vendor bloatware and trial software). That's simply not acceptable - partitioning, coupled with drive imaging, remedies the situation. How many partitions are ideal? At minimum, a two-partition scheme is required. However, three is optimal. The first partition contains the operating system and application software, the second is designated for user data (documents, photos, music, game saves, etc.) and the third acts as a repository for drive images of the first two partitions. In this scenario, you create images of the first two partitions on the third, ensuring that you always have a current image of your OS and applications, as well as your critical data. An alternate plan is to employ multiple hard drives, further increasing data security. In this scenario, you use one drive for the operating system and applications, while the other serves as your data and drive image repository. For instance, you could employ a speedy 10,000 rpm Raptor (pictured above) as your boot drive for OS and basic software, and a voluminous 7,200 RPM drive (250GB and larger), partitioned into two logical drives, for storage of data and drive images respectively. Or, you could employ three separate drives, splitting data and drive image duties between the second and third. In either case, if one drive fails, data is still secure on the other(s).  Acronis' Disk Director Suite 10 When should you partition? If you're building a system from scratch or reinstalling the OS, partition before any software is installed. For post-OS partitioning, Windows Vista allows you to shrink, extend, delete and create partitions via Vista's Disk Management. Under Windows XP and Apple's OS X, you'll need third-party software to do the job right. For this task, it's hard to beat Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 (see right). It's a great program for disk management in both Vista and XP. For stalwart Mac gamers, DiskStudio handles the job nicely. Naturally, there are plenty of others to choose from too. In either case, choose partition sizes suitable to the task. At minimum, allow 20GB for Windows XP and 40GB for Vista on your primary partition. The latter is a good minimum, as well, under OS X. Split the remainder between data and drive imaging duties. Naturally, partition sizes are extremely subjective (an Internet search yields no satisfactory consensus). They need to be large enough to accommodate the OS and all applications you plan to install, as well as allow room for paging files. Where you decide to install games – with OS and applications, or on a separate partition or drive – also affects the size of your primary partition.
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