Overview of my partitioning scheme
Partitioning helps me manage my work, especially on the computer that I use most for my writing. The figure below shows the two physical disks partitioned as follows:
| • | Disk 0 has a System partition (drive C) and a Data partition (drive D). |
| • | Disk 1 has an Archive partition (drive E), a Research partition (drive F), an Other partition (drive G), and a Paging partition (drive H).  How I partition hard disks on a computer used for writing. |
Here's how you might set up a partitioning scheme similar to mine. You can adapt these steps to meet your own needs:
1. | |
2. | Create a second partition on your first disk to store your active work files, and keep it fairly small so you can maintain it more easily. Unless your work is graphic design or video production, since your work files will be much larger. |
3. | Install a second hard disk on your computer and create at least two partitions on it, one for your paging file and the other for archiving old work files and other important files like your Outlook PST file. |
4. | Create additional partitions on your second disk only if they will contain files that are infrequently accessed to minimize contention with the paging file partition. |
Organize your work
Whether you use your PC for work or play (or both), partitioning your hard drives appropriately can help you keep organized. Disk partitioning is invaluable to me, because I'm a notoriously disorganized person. My desk tells the tale—piles of paper all over the place, sticky notes attached to monitors and walls, stacks of open books, and leftover crumbs from snacking. You can imagine what my hard drives must look like.
What's the value of using my partitioning scheme? Installing the operating system and applications on a dedicated partition (System) provides these benefits:
| • | Makes my computer easier to maintain without worrying about losing work when things go wrong. |
| • | Need to defragment this partition only after I install a new application, which is rarely because my computer is dedicated to writing and editing work, not fun and games (I have other computers for that). |
| • | Can easily use System Restore if something goes wrong so I don't lose time from my work. |
I store all my active work files on drive D and keep the folder structure on this drive simple: one main folder for each project I'm working on. My Data partition is fairly small at 2 GB. (This small size usually works unless you work in video production or graphic design, in which case your work files may be huge.) The small-sized partition and folder structure help me:
| • | Find my work quickly and keep it organized. |
| • | Promptly move suspended or inactive projects to the Other partition until I need them or until they're ready to be archived to the Archive partition. |
| • | Defragment the Data partition more quickly, which further reduces potential downtime. |
This last item may not seem like a big issue since you can schedule defragmentation to occur during off hours. But as a writer, I often find myself getting out of bed in the middle of the night to outline an idea. It's painful to wait for your computer to finish a process before you can use it.
Tip: I also have a Research partition on my second disk. That's where I save copies of white papers and other background material I find while doing research for a writing project. Most writers are packrats and I'm no exception. Keeping such research separate from my own writing helps ensure I don't accidentally merge text someone else wrote with my own work.
I've tried other partitioning schemes to organize my work and found them wanting. For example, on a previous computer I had six partitions instead of four on the second hard disk. I found out the hard way however that these smaller partitions filled up faster, so I either had to save my work on partitions where it didn't belong or spend extra time moving whole volumes of data from one drive to another—not fun. So now I keep things simple with just enough partitions to help me stay organized.
