Is it good to partition external harddrive ?

Question

I got 2TB SEADATA harddrive and i want to partition it but i am scared that partition might damage it. is it true? Does partition damages the external harddrive ?
Because before i had WD harddive ( of about 800 GB) and after partition it is not responding well. Frequently i have to format it due to which i have lost my datas. I am scared if partition will do same to the new one !!

Answer 1

An external hard drive is exactly the same as any mechanical hard drive inside your desktop or laptop, so yes, it can be partitioned also.

Answer 2

Hi, I promise I won't ask "Why would You want to do something like that?!".



First thing You should remember is that the hard drive is still the same physical hard drive used in an internal situation, it's just using an added case that can plug into a different connector on the computer. This means that it follows the same rules as an internal hard drive.



The situation You're describing to the Why askers above sounds like what I started doing a few years ago - whenever I buy new external drives now (usually about 1tb for $60) I add a 32Gb primary partition and "Live install" a couple of linux OS'es to it, then create the rest of the drive as an extended partition and format it to NTFS, which can also be used on a Windows system.



The main thing to remember when re-partitioning an older hard drive of any kind is that whatever Windows You used to partition it with the first time decided what types of partitions it can and will have - That's important because older Windows versions only supported the most recent types when they were released - so Windows XP doesn;t support some formats that Windows 7 does, or that Windows 2000 did, etc ...



If You want to guarantee that the drive can be used on most modern systems, You should copy the data from it temporarily, wipe the current partitions completely, and re-create new pratitions with something as current as a free version of Puppy linux from a flashdrive or CD. It can use the most recent formats & partitioning methods up to about 6 months ago, which means it will also support compatibility with drives as large as 4+ terabytes. And the read/write speeds will also see an improvement because of the larger block sizing and newer file-handling & RAM-Swap methods.





G'Luck!!.

Answer 3

Doing partition is not damage to your new hard drive. but some times I faced to problems while partitioning old ones. because of that think twice before partition an old hard drive.

Answer 4

Usually a HD will loose just a partition. The FAT can get damaged (not as common anymore) but you can create a number of partitions on a HD. As someone else stated, most computers can't "remember" more than 2 TB, so you partition it into two virtual drives. Even if you don't use the other partition. Unless you format all the partitions, you can only use the partitions that are formatted. One will be your BOOT partition. Now you can loose a HD because something physical happens, bad electronics, bad read arm, shock damage. So any partition on that drive would still be gone (backup, backup, backup).

Answer 5

No problem.

Answer 6

Making a partition does no damage however beware! If it's a 4 TB drive your operating system might just not recognize it and mark it as 2

Answer 7

Thank you everyone for your reply ...

I wanted to allocate space for booting drive. I did it and its working fine. Thumbs up to everyone !! ^_^

Answer 8

Think of having lots of land and then closing some off to make a farm the question is why would you want to make a farm on a external hdd (normally people make partitions for boot sectors and you would not want to boot from a external drive)

Answer 9

WHY do you want to partition it? What would that give you??

Answer 10

It shouldn't really do anything. As far as physical damage, no. Partitioning is a logical feature (of course it "physically" writes and alters data) but it doesn't do anything that actually using the hard drive doesn't do.



It's possible it could cause issues related to software, like actually reading or writing to it, but that would be fixable by reformatting.

Answer 11

partitiioning creates 2 separate parts to a drive but the drive only has one head



you wanna copy a file from 1 part to the other the head has to move the head to the file in that part, then move to the other part to copy it



i.e it results in the head having to move more than if they were only 1 part

Answer 12

partitions dont damage anything. you have to create one anyway. all a partition does is tell the filing system how many disk sectors to allocate for a DRIVE and where the start sector is ie the beginning of the drive. a second partition is just saying the next drive will start where the last sector of the previous partition finishes. where it all goes wrong is when people mix up windows and Linux and use things like GRUB when they started the disk off with Windows. thats what makes it all worrying not the fact that you want two drives on one hard disk.