The art of partitioning system drives seems to have all but died. Yes, your PC probably has a partitioned drive, but you’re probably not the one who partitioned it. Your laptop’s manufacturer and the operating system you’ve installed probably made a few for system and restoration purposes, but as far as I can tell most computer users these days don’t make disk partitions.
I think the practice has probably died down because people don’t think there’s any benefit to it, but there are still plenty of legitimate reasons to split your physical drives into logical volumes.
Quiz
Storage Through the Ages
From ancient clay tablets to modern SSDs — how much do you really know about the wild history and quirky facts of data storage?
HistoryHardwareCapacityOdditiesModern Tech
What was the storage capacity of the very first commercially sold hard disk drive, IBM’s 350 RAMAC introduced in 1956?
Correct! The IBM 350 RAMAC stored a whopping 5 megabytes — and weighed over a ton. It was the size of two refrigerators and leased for around $3,200 per month, which is roughly $35,000 in today’s money.
Not quite. The IBM 350 RAMAC, launched in 1956, stored just 5 megabytes of data. Despite that tiny capacity by modern standards, it was a revolutionary machine that filled an entire room and cost thousands per month to lease.
Which of these has genuinely been used as a data storage medium by researchers and engineers?
Correct! DNA storage is a real and rapidly advancing field. Researchers have successfully encoded entire books, images, and even operating systems into synthetic DNA strands, which can theoretically store 215 petabytes per gram of material.
Not quite. The answer is DNA molecules. Scientists have encoded movies, books, and even malware into synthetic DNA strands. DNA storage is extraordinarily dense — theoretically capable of holding 215 petabytes per gram — making it one of the most promising future storage technologies.
What does the ‘SSD’ in SSD storage stand for?
Correct! SSD stands for Solid State Drive. The ‘solid state’ refers to the fact that it uses solid-state electronics — NAND flash memory chips — with no moving mechanical parts, unlike traditional spinning hard disk drives.
Not quite. SSD stands for Solid State Drive. The term ‘solid state’ comes from electronics jargon meaning the device uses semiconductor components rather than moving mechanical parts, which is why SSDs are faster, quieter, and more durable than HDDs.
Approximately how many standard 1.44 MB floppy disks would you need to match the storage of a single modern 1 terabyte hard drive?
Correct! One terabyte equals roughly 1,048,576 megabytes, and dividing by 1.44 MB per floppy gives you about 728,000 disks. Stacked, that pile would be taller than most skyscrapers — a humbling reminder of how far storage has come.
Not quite. You’d need approximately 700,000 floppy disks to match a single 1 TB drive. That stack of disks would reach over a mile high if laid flat, which is a staggering way to visualize the enormous leap in storage density over just a few decades.
What storage medium did NASA use to store data from the original Apollo moon missions in the 1960s and 1970s?
Correct! NASA relied heavily on magnetic tape reels during the Apollo era. In fact, thousands of original Apollo-era data tapes were eventually lost or accidentally erased and reused, leading to a massive archival effort years later to recover what footage remained.
Not quite. NASA used magnetic tape reels to store Apollo mission data. Tragically, many of these original tapes were later lost or even deliberately erased and reused due to tape shortages, which is why some original high-quality Apollo footage is gone forever.
What is the name of the technique used in modern NAND flash storage that stores multiple bits per cell to increase density?
Correct! QLC, or Quad-Level Cell, stores 4 bits per cell and is used in high-capacity, budget-friendly SSDs. While it offers great density and lower cost, QLC NAND typically has lower endurance and slower write speeds compared to TLC (3-bit) or MLC (2-bit) designs.
Not quite. QLC stands for Quad-Level Cell, and it’s a real NAND flash technology that stores four bits per cell. It allows for very high storage densities at lower cost, but trades off endurance and write performance compared to older, less dense cell types like MLC or SLC.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway stores seeds for agricultural preservation — but what famous tech company also operates a nearby ‘Arctic Code Vault’ to preserve software?
Correct! GitHub operates the Arctic Code Vault in Svalbard, Norway, where they stored a snapshot of all active public repositories on film designed to last 1,000 years. The project is part of GitHub’s Arctic Vault Program to preserve open-source software for future generations.
Not quite. It’s GitHub — owned by Microsoft — that runs the Arctic Code Vault. In February 2020, they photographed every active public repository onto special archival film and stored it deep within a decommissioned coal mine in Svalbard, designed to last a thousand years.
What was the primary reason early floppy disks were called ‘floppy’?
Correct! Early floppy disks — especially the original 8-inch variety from IBM in 1971 — used a thin, genuinely flexible magnetic disk inside a soft protective sleeve. You could literally flop the thing around. Later 3.5-inch versions came in rigid plastic cases, but kept the ‘floppy’ name.
Not quite. The name ‘floppy’ came from the physical flexibility of the magnetic disk inside the sleeve. The original 8-inch IBM floppy disks introduced in 1971 had a noticeably limp, floppy disk that you could bend. Even the rigid-cased 3.5-inch disks that followed kept the iconic nickname.
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You don’t need partitions—but “optional” doesn’t mean pointless
Just because you can skip it doesn’t mean you should
To be clear, partitioning isn’t necessary anymore, not like it was in the ’90s or 2000s. Modern OSes are perfectly happy to work with single enormous volumes, and thanks to the rise of SSDs there’s no performance benefits to partitioning. With spinning mechanical drives, there were some partitioning tricks where you could ensure your system partition was on the fastest parts of the disk platter, but obviously with an SSD that’s meaningless.
While partitioning isn’t needed to improve performance or get around technical limitations anymore, there are reasons to take control over how your data is structured. If anything, the rise of multi-terabyte SSDs and HDDs has made those choices more relevant, not less.
One giant drive is simple—right up until it isn’t
Convenience now, chaos later
There’s no argument that the easiest solution is to just have a big continuous volume, but in the long run that’s going to become pretty hard to manage. While you can use folder structure to organize your data, and that’s fine, this doesn’t place any hard limits on your data.
What do I mean by that? Well, if you don’t want to use more than a certain amount of space for a specific purpose, like video games, or as a video editing scratch drive, or for a media server program on a drive, then creating a partition specific to that use helps ensure you stay within that limit. In other words, partitions allow you to reserve space on a large drive for specific things, which means you’ll always have that much space available for that reserved purpose regardless of what else you do on the computer.
OS recovery has improved, but clean separation is still safer
Reset buttons are nice—firebreaks are better
In the bad old days, it was pretty normal to format and reinstall your OS every year or so, or when things went catastrophically downhill. This is why I always partitioned my hard drive into an OS, application, and data partition.
This let me nuke the OS partition without touching a single bit of data on the other partitions. Some people argue this isn’t necessary anymore because modern operating systems can do such a good job of repairing themselves, but I would counter that with my own anecdotal experience of Windows 10 and Windows 11 completely failing to repair itself using bootable media or the built-in repair tools many times over the years.
So, for me, it still make sense to either have a dedicated physical system drive that you can wipe without losing data, or a partition of your drive that does the same job. Just keep in mind that you don’t have to install your applications on the system partition. It just needs to be big enough to host the OS and any update or other working files you need.
Backups are easier to start—but harder to scale
Backups are easier to start—but harder to scale
Drive partitions can make it much easier to create disk image backups. It’s as simple as that. It’s rarely necessary to create snapshots of entire drives with all the data on them, so if you only had to image and back up your system partition, that saves time, bandwidth, and makes restoring things much faster if they go wrong. Of course, the same goes for any type of partition, and you can easily restore it to another drive too, which is faster than cloning one enormous drive volume.
7/10
- Brand
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Synology
- CPU
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Intel Celeron J4125
This four-bay NAS works great for home and small office use, and it comes with a three-year warranty from Synology.
Bigger drives make partitioning more useful, not less
The truth is that partitioning was more of a pain in the past with smaller drives. These days even SSDs are routinely multiple terabytes in size, and modern hard drives can reach dizzying capacities like 32TB! This means, for me at least, partitioning is now more useful than it was in the past. You may think it’s not necessary, and you’d be right, but it’s far from obsolete or useless.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
