sandy said:
I purchased a hard drive & hard drive enclosure, to use for backing up my
system. Do I need to partition the hard drive? If I do have to, how much
space to I have to allocate for the partition (what's the purpose of the
partition?)?
Thanks for your help
Yes you have to partition and format it.
A hard drive can contain multiple partitions. Each partition then
becomes a drive letter when formatted.
Its up to you why you need multiple partitions. You can make one or
many. You can also make folders and put things in different folders.
One example:
I know this is a backup drive, but if you did this on you main drive, C:
could be lets say 30 gig for the OS. And then the rest for data.
This way if you were downloading and got a bit zealous and downloaded
too much the data partition would just fill and then stop. But since
its a different "drive" it would not encroach on the OS partition C:.
Thus your OS would not run out of room and possibly corrupt.
But there are gobs of other reasons why. Every user has his pet reasons.
Hope this helps.