Why do you need to partition SSD drives?

FPS Addict · 20 Jul 2010 at 12:08

I was wandering, if you had two SSD drives lets say 60gb each, Put them in raid 0 configuration so te operating system can be installed.

What is a partition and why do you need it?

is it lets say you just want 35gb for the operating system and the rest of the partition to install your apps, games, E.T.C

Tealc · 20 Jul 2010 at 12:17

A partition will split the 120GB RAID 0 drive into 2 or more sections and each section will appear as a different drive letter and logical location.

You probably don't really need to split the 120GB into sections.

Have a mechanical drive for your data storage and have your main apps, OS and top games on the SSDs.

sk3lph · 20 Jul 2010 at 12:20

Partitioning splits a HDD into separate areas, so for example you can split a 1TB drive into two 500GB areas so it will appear that you have a C drive and a D drive of 500GB instead of a 1TB C drive.

Not worth doing in my opinion as you can install your games and apps into the same partition but in a different folder so you are still keeping them separate if required. Formatting the C drive to reinstall the OS will usually create problems if you have your apps in a separate partition meaning you'll need to reinstall them anyway.

So to sum up - don't bother doing it and reformatting your OS to solve a problem is a walnut sledgehammer approach to solving an issue, so don't do that either.

Justintime · 20 Jul 2010 at 12:30

Partitions don't mean splitting your drive, all drives must be partitioned to be usable for whatever file system is used, even if its just one partition that uses all of the available space.

HangTime · 20 Jul 2010 at 13:16

No need for more than one partition on SSD drives. On mechanical drives some people used to do it as a way of ensuring that they could keep a subset of their files (say operating system) in the fastest part of the disk.

olivier renault · 20 Jul 2010 at 14:08

also give more control over file fragmentation problems, and if you want to re-install the OS on the disk, you can wipe out one partition, not the whole disk. Although for a SSD that's suppose to contain the OS and a few applications / games, that's a moot point. File fragmentation on SSD is also not applicable.