Hi, I've got a new PC with 1 Tera SSD hard drive. I divided the hard drive for convenience (separate storage and back up) into three drives. I have done this for years with my old PCs. I was told that splitting the hard drive is not recommended for a SSD drive. Is it correct? Thanks
No that is not correct. Partitioning an SSD is often desirable to separate Windows, Apps, Data, Backups, etc. (same as with an HDD). Just don't expect any performance improvement when partitioning an SSD.
There is nothing wrong with creating multiple partitions on SSD drive. If it is convenient for you go for it. For budget price SSD it is recommended to leave some space (5%-20%) unused (unpartitioned) as manual over-provisioning, but you can do that however you like. You can create 1 partition and leave rest space unpartitioned (or create partition without filesystem so OS can't use it). You can also create 256 partitions and leave the same amount of unpartitioned space for over-provisioning. For upper range consumer SSD models from reputable brands this manual over-provisioning is not needed. Keep in mind that, as a general rule that is not tied to particular mass storage technology, backup done on the same drive isn't as reliable as backup done on other drive, because in the event of drive failure everything on the drive may be unrecoverable. That kind of backup just secures from some software bugs and user mistakes.
The biggest issue I have with partitioning any drive is you may run out of room in one or more of the partitions and actually get out of memory errors while you still have lots of room in another partition. But if you just use folders with subfolder, you always have the full space available. So while I used to partition drives, now I never do. I just use folders and subfolder. Or multiple drives. And just for future reference, a "hard" drive is the old technology, with spinning platters (or "disks"), motors, and a Read/Write head mounted on an arm that swings back and forth across the platters. It is very mechanical with many moving parts. And in fact, is an electromechanical device. A solid state drive or SSD has no moving parts. It is totally electronic. Now while there such a thing called a hybrid drive, there is no such thing as a "SSD hard drive". A hybrid drive, btw, is a hard drive. It is big, and heavy and has spinning platters, motors, and a R/W head on a swinging arm. It is sometimes called a SSHD or solid state hard drive because the integrated buffer uses the same memory technology devices as found in SSDs. It helps improve the performance over a standard hard drive - but is still much slower than even the slowest SSD. Clear as mud, huh?
samy, I have about 30 partitions on the SSD in my test computer. Almost all are different OS but there is a common data partition. I like to keep data files out of OS partitions so the image backups of the OS are lean and mean. You can backup the data partition with Robocopy, Bvckup2, etc. Or imaging. Your choice.
