Recently I've bought a Toshiba L850 laptop (i7, 8gb, 1tb). It has only one partition (c:).
So what is the difference between single partition and multiple partition?
Recently I've bought a Toshiba L850 laptop (i7, 8gb, 1tb). It has only one partition (c:).
So what is the difference between single partition and multiple partition?
On a standard laptop with an average sized drive the multiple partition scheme only makes things more complicated. And generally makes performance worse.
On very large drives it may be impossible to allocate the entire drive to a single partition (this was a big problem with the old FAT file systems), so you must use multiple partitions. Also, in some very specific cases using multiple partitions (placing "bulk" data on the second partition) can improve performance (but if you do it wrong performance gets worse).
Multiple partitions may be used to isolate critical data into a separate partition, on the theory that if the main partitions file system gets "hosed" the data can be recovered, but this doesn't protect you from physical drive failure, and it's a difficult scheme to manage. (Plus quite a few applications cannot handle the concept of data in a different partition from the program.)
(The main reason why you still might want to have multiple partitions is to be able to install Linux or some other OS, in addition to Windows.)
I suggest you to read this introductory guide to Hard Drives and Partitions. It's main aim is to provide help for installing Fedora Linux, but the basic concepts about Hard Drives and Partitions are universal, not OS-related, concepts.
The Disk Partitioning article on Wikipedia also has some explanations and pros/cons about partitioning.
Several primary partitions increases the survivability of your information. Especially if you use a primary partition. At least you can separate the operating system from its data. To do the reconstruction using their own logical drives. Also, place the reserved MFT to NTFS under reduced at partitioning.