Are there any benefits to partitioning a hard disk drive? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Advantages/Disadvantages of Partitioning a Drive

Be it an external hard disk or an internal one running an Operating System; is there any benefit to partitioning a hard disk other than to organize files? If there are, please list them.

Answer 1

of course,

1. you can format partitions independently
2. you can mount, unmount partititions (mostly in Unix environment)
3. you can use different file systems for different partitions
4. easier recovery
5. you can use encryption for certain partition.

It's always good idea to use one partition for OS (system files) another for data etc. In unix/linux systems there is also so called swap partition, it's used for virtual drive (in case when there is not enough RAM)

In case you have large external Hard Drive you can use LVM if you familiar. Or just one huge partition, why not?

Answer 2

1. Preventing overflowing data from killing your OS.
2. Using different filesystems for different purposes (e.g. raw for DBMS).
3. Using different filesystems for multibooting various operating systems.
4. Ditto VMs.
5. Hiding things (a little bit).

Answer 3

Partitioning your HD allows you to mount different volumes off the same HD. No benefits other that separating your system files from user files.