What is disk partition and partition table? Learn what a primary partition and a logical partition is, and if disk partitioning good or bad. Find the best disk partition software to partition your hard drive.
Primary Partition is one kind of volume type and it contains the necessary files and data for booting operating system. In other word, if you want to install the OS on the disk, it is an indispensable part. Meanwhile, four is the maximum number in MBR disk and any one of them can set as an active partition, which is based on primary volume. Due to there may be four primary volumes in MBR disk, it means four different operating systems are workable. However, the active volume consists of boot loader (such as ntldr or bootmgr) to load operating systems, so, only the one marked active can be used for the initial booting.
The Extended Partition cannot be used directly and it must be parted into several logical drives. It is not used to save data but to hold logical drives. You can create logical drive without limitation in number. Meanwhile, you can keep data, files or games on it, which is similar with the primary drive. If there is one extended drive on a disk, many logical drives can break the restriction of numbers in primary partition. Thus, you needn't to worry where to save classified data.
It is like a recorder to keep some information about primary, extended and logical volumes. Any modification can be recorded permanently to reflect the changes on volumes. If it is attacked by virus or other stuffs, your volume will be lost. Therefore, taking measures to keep the table safe is extremely essential.
When installing the Windows operating system, you may want to partition the disk into several volumes for storing files and programs. As we all know, a disk partition means a defined storage space on a hard drive. It is available to divide a hard disk into several volumes on Windows operating system. By this way, you can get few primary and logical partitions for better use. Generally speaking, users would like one volume to keep system programs and others to save data, documents or games. Why allocate volumes like this? Because when the system is attacked by virus or crashes, the system volume can be restored by reinstalling the OS, while other volumes' data keeps as usual, for the destruction doesn't affect them.
Another reason for people to partition a disk is that smaller drives provide smaller cluster sizes. The smallest chunk to store data in a drive is a cluster size. In a large drive, if a cluster size of 64KB is offered, it means 64KB's space on disk will be occupied even a file with one word in it. How wasteful the space is! Thus, a smaller one is needed. Compared to the large one, the same file size may be just required 2KB in smaller one. It is really an efficient method to keep numerous small files, isn’t it?
No matter which reason you are based on for dividing the disk, you must to know some disk partition knowledge before. It will give you a big hand when you do the operations.
After you have learned the information above, it's time to partition a disk. There are two ways for you to separate it. The first one is using the diskpart.exe command to create, delete and format drives. As for the second one, it is a graphical tool - AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition (free partition manager), which helps you to finish the same task in many operating system. It is a complete free partition manager with few simple steps to handle. With the help of it, you can partition a disk, resize/move a drive and allocate free space to adjust the size of drives. As for data disk that you didn’t installed OS on, you can try “Quick Partition” feature to partition the disk into several volumes simultaneously. Here is the main interface:
Do you want to optimize disk space usage? Why not download the magical tool to help you?