Hard Drive Configurations... a mystery to me?

Over the past few years I have noticed that when purchasing a new PC such as my new ASUS laptop (N71VN-X1 P8700) 4 GB DDR2 RAM, I've had this since mid July of 2010, the drive are logically separated.

Hard drives apparently are now configured (as with my ASUS) with a "C" & "D" partition, my Bluray/DVD/CD burner is "E".

On the C drive it is entitled "OS" obviously for the Operating System. The D drive is "DATA". I am not sure exactly why this is done and as it would happen information that I store such as my programs (MS Office, Paintshop Pro) as well as my Itunes program and library, Word documents, etc., all defaulted directly to my C drive. The end result is that my "C" drive is full in a rather new laptop. I do realize I must move this information on the "C" drive over to either the "D" or the "G" - the one Tera byte Western Digital external hard drive I bought.

My questions are two fold:

Firstly - where is the best place to transfer and save my existing data?
Secondly - How do I do this in such a way to maximize my pc space and performance - which I suspect is suffering a bit because of this issue?

Any direction, advice, explanation is very much appreciated.

Regards,

DigitalSwag

 

The D: drive may be a recovery partition. Some PC makers install them as a cheaper alternative to recovery discs.

 

It's a good idea to to make a set of Windows Recovery Discs and a clone copy of the "D" drive.

It blows my mind how many manufacturers have cheaped out to the point of not spending the fifty cents or so it would cost to include a mass-produced system restore DVD with a new PC. If the hard drive crashes within the warranty period, they have to send a copy anyway with the replacement drive. If the drive crashes out of warranty, it costs a customer as much as $40 to order a system restore DVD from the manufacturer.

For storage stability, I would clone the "D" partition to a USB flash drive not used for any other purpose. 8GB flash drives are currently cheap; I found them recently as low as $10/each.

 

I only wanted to add that having glanced at your laptop's very brief manual, it appears that Asus divides the HD into two partitions 60% to C: and 40% to D:. I think they do this because their recovery options now include one for only overwriting the C: partition leaving D: intact. This is a good thing because should you need to recovery the laptop to factory conditions anything you store on D: would be safe from the recovery process.

You might try looking in Disk Management to verify that I have this correct. Start> and type in diskmgmt.msc into the search box and hit enter. In the window that opens look at the graph and see how many partitions it shows. There should be a C:, D: and then also a recovery partition. If this set up is what you have then D: is not the recovery partition but as you originally suspected a place to store personal data such as music, video, photos and documents that you want to keep separate from the OS files.

 

Partitioning a HD is a very good policy in that in the event that the primary and active partition becomes corrupted in any way and is unable to boot, then your data is probably safe on the other partition.

I know that some may say that the information could almost certainly be accessed via a Linux Live CD but most users may be unaware of that information.

On all of my builds, I have a similar set up. So in answer to your first question, I always store my data on a DATA partition.

Partitioning a HD is much like cutting up a cake and as such certain broad guidelines can be followed at the outset.

Example 1, 250GB hd drive with user being a prolific gamer. Ignoring formating quirks, I would use a 170GB as primary and bootable partition ie where the o/s and progs would reside and the rest would form my Data partition ie 80GB

Example 2, same HD size but user is an amateur photographer. In which case 85Gb for the primary and the rest for data.

You can manipulate partition sizes with many progs even after they have been created. Two that I have used are Partition Magic and BiNG to resize partitions.

You have not stated what the partition sizes are for C:\ and D:\ but have merely stated that C:\ is full.

One last thing to remember is that some progs create default save locations eg iTunes and if the My Documents location still remains at C:\ then the size of your Music library maybe causing part of the problem.

Hope this helps

Good Luck

 

My preference is to partition a physical drive into at least C: and D:. C: is the system partition, and gets used for the OS and installed application software. D: gets used for data files created by the application software.

My reasoning has to do with backing up the system. There is no point in making backup copies of the OS or installed software files. If that drive dies, you'll have to re-install the OS and the application software to a replacement drive unless you've made an image of the system partition that you can write to a replacement drive. However, an image must be of the entire partition, junk and free space included. While you can also image a data partition, there's usually stuff that you don't want to bother backing up, so space can be saved in the backup by not making an image of the entire data partition. You back up only the files that you need to. The result is a much smaller backup file than an image file of the same partition.

In other words, it can be useful to separate OS and installed applications from their data files, so as to permit the use of different backup strategies for each type of stuff.