Stop Partitioning Your SSDs; Learn Why should you not partition SSDs

The partitioning of SSDs was a common practice in the old times, but PCs have evolved a lot in past few years. The hardware has shifted from mechanical Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) to solid-state drives (SSDs). And this shift has caused performance arguments for partitioning to be obsolete.

When the mechanical Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) were common. Dividing a single drive into multiple local volumes was much practiced, especially in personal computing. The main agenda for this partition was data organization and safety. The creation of a dedicated “C” drive for the operating system and a separate “D” drive for personal files gave a sense of Security. So that even if the data from the “C” drive gets corrupted or required complete reinstallation, the data on the secondary partition remained unaffected.

The main reason for partitioning of hard drives was performance optimization, in the age of spinning hard disk drives. With the use of a technique known as “short stroking” users would install the operating system on the outer edge of the hard drive platter, as the edge of spinning platter moved faster than the inner tracks, so the data located there could accessed faster.

But SSDs no longer depend on spinning platters, like mechanical drives, so there is no faster outer edge to target. The access times are same across the entire drive. The use of a complex wear-leveling algorithms in SSDs, evenly distribute the data across physical memory cells. This increases the drive’s lifespan. The operating system has no control over where the data physically sits on the chips.

Partitioning was commonly practiced before because it was a legitimate solution for that time, but now the things have changed. The most common issue with partitioning is the inefficiency of fixed storage limits. As when you partition a drive, you are forced to predict the future storage needs of your operating systems and applications. For example, if you allocate 100GB for your operating system partition, and with years of updates, temporary cache files, and expanding applications footprints will eventually fill that space completely. This leads to your system drive with no storage causing performance throttling and update failures. Whereas the secondary data partition sits with hundreds of gigabytes of free space. And resizing these partition carries a risk of data corruption.

For decades, these practical benefits of partitioning was a best practice among system builders and IT professionals. Even though the hardware has changed, this practice remained as a legacy of advice.

Today’s Modern operating systems have evolved with features like Windows “Reset this PC” or macOS “Recovery Mode” that is used to refresh system files while preserving user data without needing a separate partition. The modern operating systems comes with advance features and compatibility, so the files systems and folders structures are enough to handle organization’s data and manage them. This makes a largely practiced disk partitioning just a relic of the past.

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