• A hard drive partition creates multiple logical drives within a single physical drive.hard drive image by Graham Lumsden from Fotolia.com
  
  

Partitions Have Many Benefits

• Keeping your operating system on a separate partition is useful for several reasons. It allows you to back up your operating system separately from your data and vice versa. It also protects you from total hard drive failure by creating multiple logical drives within the single physical drive.
  
  

A Partition May Be Unnecessary

• SCSI, solid state drive and RAID users may not want partitions, because they're already using faster, smaller drives dedicated to operating systems or data. In these cases, the computer system as a whole is still partitioned. But the partition is among separate physical drives, rather than among separate logical drives within a single physical drive.
  
  

Bottom Line

• Unless your computer is built with more expensive, high-end drives, a separate partition for your operating system will improve hard drive performance, make your data easier to back up and guard against total hard drive failure. For the average user, these are powerful incentives for an operating system partition.