New to this chat room & not sure I’m in right place. But here goes … Have a new Lenovo laptop with Win10 & 1T SSD. Old Win7 laptop was partitioned as C (system); E (Applications); and F (Files). Having the F partition made it really easy to have my folders/files separate from system stuff. Cannot find anything on line about partitioning Win10 SSD. Prefer to keep files on SSD vs. cloud if possible. Any ideas, links, etc. are appreciated.
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The “Disk Management” tool should allow you to partition your drive.
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I think you are correct re Disk Mgmt tool. My main question is if partitioning is a smart or necessary thing to do in present time OR if there are reasons not to do it. I don’t really trust cloud storage. My old laptop was set up 12 years ago. I wish there were an easy to follow checklist for setting up a new Win10 laptop! Any/all ideas are welcomed.
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Partitioning is useful if you find it useful. It takes a limited amount of space and divides it up… so now you have more limits to worry about coming up against. I don’t find it very useful, but I don’t generally have the problem of putting things in strange places or randomly filling my HD because I keep too much stuff.
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I personally don’t know of a compelling reason to do it outside of installing multiple operating system. A simple folder structure should help you achieve what you want, but per @PHolder - you don’t have much to lose, I guess.
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A lot of people put windows and programs on one partition and data on the other one…
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I have always partitioned since I first started using HDs.
It is a matter of forward planning.
At some point your OS WILL become unstable or unreliable due to age, or yet another feature pack of doom sent from microsoft.
First preference is to get it back on its feet and continue or salvage everything you want to save.
I favour that the OS partition is expendable if need be, so doing a FORMAT C:/ Q will not even make you break a sweat of concern.
My preference;
C=System. Here I install most daily stuff like web browsers and media players
D=Programs. Here I install large packages that may have lots of extra plugins addons or may be a suite of software.
Games will be in their own root Games folder or depending on amount of other software may be in their own partition.
E=Data. Here I put My Documents folder and all the stuff I make.
F=Temp. Here I put the swapfile and all relocatable temp folders. This drastically reduces fragmentation of the C drive.
When browsing the web any malware that may lurk in your caches is likely in the TEMP partition meaning no matter how locked and undeletable files may try to be, they cannot defend against you formatting the damn thing while waving a middle finger at the screen.
When you reboot everything needed will just be recreated as it gets used.
I can reinstall the OS and then the installation of all those big packages is much quicker to carry on from where I left off, especially if you can just get the installer to do a fix for a corrupt install.
Don’t need to salvage the important documents as they are safe in their own partition.
I recommend using MiniTools Partition Wizard (free) if you want to keep the current OS, as it will let you do dynamic resizing as well as partitioning and recovery. It will also partition and format many other filesystems, so is also handy for Linux and android partitioning.
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I definitely used to partition OS and data partitions so a loss of the OS partition would not mean a loss of data. Nowadays though, with syncing to the cloud or to a server, I have not done that as much.
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One thing to note with SSDs is if you have enough RAM it is worth using a RAM disk to put the temp folders in (not the swapfile).
Some Mobo companies have software that can manage it for you and dump the final files to disk when you shut down which is handy. I used the ASRock software on one of my previous PCs.
This makes an incredible difference to the amount of write cycles to the SSD
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AMD offers a 4G RAM disk for free.
http://www.radeonramdisk.com/software_downloads.php
I’ve been using it for years and it works great.
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