Hard Drive Maintenance

Maintaining data on your hard drive in an orderly fashion has many benefits. Obviously, the better your data is organised, the quicker you can find it. More importantly, however, having your data ordered makes backing it up much safer.

Organising Your Data

By simply having your data in one area and making sure you regularly backup that area, you can rest safe in the knowledge that vital data is safe. So what are the options available regarding the management of data on your hard drive?

Hard Drive Folders

You may be aware that any hard drive can be split up, either into partitions or folders. This is where the hard drive is permanently split into sections. Each section will appear as a drive letter on your computer. There is no limit to the number of partitions you can have on your hard drive. The advantage of having partitions on a hard drive is that the data in one partition cannot contaminate the data in another partition. The disadvantage is that you cannot change the partition size easily should you need to at a later date.

Single Partition Storage Devices

Imagine that you have split up your disk into four partitions of music, video, photos and data. At some stage you realise that you have miscalculated and allotted too little space for the video files. You now have to have the video files stored in another partition, which is bound to mess up the organisation of your disk. A far better solution would be to keep the hard drive in a single partition, then simply create folders on the hard drive. This way, you can have small folders and large video folders all residing on one partition.

All our hard drives are supplied with one partition, so all you need to do is add the folders and start storing your material.