Some older or less sophisticated boot programs may not be able to boot from an extended partition but only from a primary one, so it's also good practice not to use a primary slot for a partition you know you will never want to boot, leaving it free in case you later need another bootable partition. This ensures that further additions can never run out of partition slots. Therefore it's standard practice, when creating the first partition for which an extended partition slot can be used, to create it as an extended partition. If all four primary partition slots are allocated to primary partitions, it's no longer possible to add an extended partition and thus you can add no more partitions to that drive, even if you have free space. One of these may be used to create/hold an extended partition, which in turn allows additional partitions on the drive that do not use any of the remaining three primary partition slots in the MBR. There are four primary partition slots on an MBR-formatted drive. When creating a second partition for data storage (i.e., not the boot partition) for an OS, the primary difference here is that it may affect your ability to create more partitions later. at the end of the day, it's pretty much the same. While GPT does store a second GPT table at the end of the disk which sounds just great, it also requires at least twice as many LBAs to work, which again doubles the rate of unrecoverable read failures. Note that contrary to urban myth, GPT is not necessarily much safer than MBR. The most important advantage is that you can have partitions larger than 2 TB and you can boot Windows in UEFI mode (presumed all other preconditions hold). That will only work if you have a reasonably recent computer and operating system, but in that case it will have some (minor) advantages. When setting up completely from scratch (which is not the case from the wording of your question, since you want to assign drive letter D:, so that's not an option), you might consider GPT. Saves you one useless disk seek on mount. But why not just use a primary partition if there's only one partition on the disk so far! There's no reason not to go with a primary partition, really. In practice, 1/10 15 and 50% of 1/10 15 are pretty much the same. So, strictly speaking, in terms of data security, a primary partition is 50% less likely to fail. A primary partition only requires one LBA (the MBR). In theory there is a difference insofar as an extended partition requires two LBAs (the MBR plus the first sector in the extended partition) to be written to once, and to be read subsequently on every mount. it doesn't matter if you have two baskets, if you're carrying them both in the same hand.Īssuming data is 'safe' because it's on a different partition on the same physical drive, no matter how you format it, is 'all eggs in one basket'. You must periodically actually test you can recover from these backups - otherwise you wasted your time saving them. In short, that means at minimum you need one on-site backup & one off-site backup The on-site backup must at least be a different physical drive, if not a different physical machine. "Any data not stored in at least three distinct locations ought to be considered temporary." If the drive fails, or you get a nasty virus, or you just delete a file & don't notice for a couple of days, then your partitioning didn't improve your chances at all.įor data loss-prevention, your only security is to never keep only one copy of anything. In terms of data security, whether you have all your data & OS on the same partition or you split a single drive into two partitions makes no difference whatsoever.
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