What are Disk Partitions

We here people talking about this all the time, and we see so much disk partitioning software everywhere, but exactly what is disk partitions?

In a nutshell, disk partitioning is where we divide up the space on a hard disk into a number of virtual hard disk drives. So it’s one hard disk that is split into many and they all act as separate entities. They are known as partitions and labeled differently so that we treat them as independent drives. As well as asking “what is disk partitions”, we could also ask “what is slices?” since disk partitions are often known as ‘slices’ for different operating systems that are based on Solaris and BSD. These partitions can be easily created, resized, manipulated or even deleted by using partition editing software.

Usually, the total storage space on a PC hard drive disk can be split up into four primary partitions at the most. An alternative is to create three primary partitions and then make an extended partition. Both of these partitions can be seen described in the Partition table by 16 byte entries, found within the master boot record of your PC. The type of partition can be identified by looking in the partition table entry for it, at its 1 byte code.

As soon we know what is disk partitions and once the identification of a partition type is known, it is possible to find extra information about the purpose of it and what contents there might be in it. For instance, oftentimes there are partition type codes that hide the contents of a partition from many operating systems. However, its file system might not remain hidden if the operating system or a partitioning tool is able to examine the partition’s boot sectors, so long as the OS or partitioning tool has been programmed to do so. As well as this, boot indicators and partition types can be modified easily by the use of applications like MBRWizard if needed.

The operating system and its program files can be separated. This means that you can make image backups (sometimes called clones) of not only the OS, but also any installed software that you have.You can create space for virtual memory swapping and paging by the operating system.Storing programs that are frequently used and their data near to each other, allowing for easier access.You can separate log files and cache files from other files stored in your system. This is useful as these files can alter size rapidly, potentially filling up a file system.You can install more than one operating system on a PC by using multi-boot setups. For instance, it is possible to install Windows, Mac OSX and Linux on separate partitions on the same hard drive, so that you can choose during boot up which operating system you want to use.It’s possible to protect and isolate certain files, making it much easier to recover data from a corrupted file system. If only one of your partitions has been corrupted, the file systems on the other partition will remain unaffected and can still be salvaged.Partitions can raise the overall performance of your computer if it runs on a system that is more efficient using smaller file systems. For example, a large hard drive that has just one NTFS will in most cases have an MFT (Master File Table) that is very large. It takes longer for your system to read this than it does to read a smaller MFT split up in partitions.

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