Certainly, you have head that many people have lost valuable data and have hard challenges trying to recover it when their hard drives became corrupted. Usually, people who suffer the most are those who have not partitioned their hard drives. You can benefit in many ways with a partitioned hard drive. For instance, you can create a more secure storage space in your computer for your most important and crucial files by dedicating one partition solely to those files, and securing it with a strong password if you would like.

Understanding partitioning

Before you can go about partitioning your hard drive, you have to understand exactly what it is that you are doing. In basic terms, partitioning a hard drive is the process of dividing it into multiple sections. You can view this as a library where you have different sections dedicated to different fields. For instance, there is the fiction, non-fiction, history, sciences, and other sections. Hard drive partitions will serve more or less the same way. The only difference is that, you can access each partition as an individual hard drive, and you can carry out every function in it as you would an individual hard drive.

How hard drives work

To understand the significance of partitioning your hard drive, it is essential to understand how it stores data, and its basic components. Simply put, a hard drive is a collection of plates, which store data using magnetic read/write heads running around the disk. If you have ever taken the time to examine this part of a hard drive, it is at times difficult to comprehend how such a small thing can store hundreds of thousands or million bits of data. Nevertheless, if you can think of that, then it is easy to see how fragile a hard drive is, and how it can easily be corrupted.

The fragility of the hard drive

You must realize that hard drives are not as durable as you may think. In fact, they are very fragile. The read/write heads on a hard drive are so close the platters- less than the thickness of hair; you will be astonished how they manage never to touch the surface. There is an ultra-slim lubricant over every platter that keeps off the read/write heads. Nevertheless, at times these heads touch the platters at such angles that the lubricant can do nothing, hence scratching the drive.

Another problem is that ambient air cannot enter a hard disk. Even the tiniest speck of dust can most certainly damage data on your hard drive, and scratch the platter so that an entire sector turns bad and refuses to run. This sort of thing happens daily to unsuspecting people who use hard drives of any kind. The thing is, hard drives do allow a tiny amount of air to enter them in order to equalize with the pressure in the atmosphere. However, the hard drives have filters around them to make certain no particles are trapped inside. Even so, this filter is not going to work so efficiently after some time.

The benefits of partitioning

To grasp the main benefit of partitioning, it helps to understand how windows operating system functions in terms of hard drives. Windows will regard each partition as its own volume data. This means, if you have a hard drive with two partitions, and the system partition is corrupted and no longer accessible, Windows will read the unaffected partition if you install the hard drive in another computer with Windows. You can then take most of your data out if not all. If everything was in one partition, then that is pretty much the end of your hard drive.

Alternative cloud storage in case the hard drive collapses

Your hard drive may collapse all together and leave you helpless, resulting to highly expensive methods of recovering data, which might not even get all the data. It is essential to have several backups of your data. Purchasing multiple hard drives is very expensive and so are most traditional cloud storage services. Symform is a cloud-based storage platform that stores your data safely into several redundant arrays divided across the globe. You can be able to get as much as 200 GB of storage space free, provided you offer that much of your hard drive space to the service.

Author Bio:

Today’s featured writer, Nancy Baker, is a freelance blogger, who often writes for Hard Drives For Sale, leading providers of hard drives for sale. She likes to practice yoga to stay healthy and fit. You can also follow her on Twitter @Nancy Baker.