Hard Drive Partition

Each hard drive in your computer can have several partitions. With the popularity of larger hard drives, it is becoming more common to see multiple partitions on a single drive. A partition is a logical drive. That is, while you may only have one physical drive (one unit that you can physically hold in your hand), that drive may be broken up into several logical drives. Your operating system will see a number of logical drives named, for example, C: and D:, but they will all reside on the same physical hard drive. Get used to the distinction between physical and logical stuff, as it is quite important.

How many partitions can you have? The minimum number is one, of course, for a useable drive you can store stuff on; however, you are free to create more partitions, with few limitations. Windows will automatically name your primary partition C:\ and let you futz around with the other names as you like, while Macs have no automatic system for naming partitions (mainly because partitioning is so rare on a Mac).

If you'd like to partition your hard drive, you can read our guide on creating hard drive partitions.

Accessing partitions

Windows

If you open up My Computer, you can see all your partitions under "Hard Disk Drives", like you see here:

Macintosh

In OS X, all your hard drives will be sitting as on the desktop as separate discs, like so: