# Managing 4Tb drive



## brianwall (Oct 17, 2011)

I am shortly replacing 3x 2Tb hard drives with a Western Digital Black 4Tb in a major reorganisation of my system. Currently my drives are not partitioned and folders have become badly organised as I was led to believe that partitioning wasn't a good idea nowadays. A few folders are mapped to drive letters and I have a 3Tb NAS drive on my router for backup.

My question is whether to partition the new 4Tb drive or to create a folder structure and map some to drive letters?

I have a Win 8.1 setup with 16Gb RAM, an SSD boot drive and SATA6 and am a photographer so have very large files to move around at times.

Any comments welcomed.


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## Masterchiefxx17 (Feb 27, 2010)

Partitions are only good for if you need to keep file separate.

They can also be used to keep a good file structure, but that is more up to the user.

I would just like the 4TB as is.


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## brianwall (Oct 17, 2011)

So there is no system disadvantage one way or the other? I think a mix of partitions and folders purely for organisation sounds best then.


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## Masterchiefxx17 (Feb 27, 2010)

You wouldn't want to have more then three partitions but other then that there is no disadvantage.

You may get a slower read/write speed though.


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## BosPatrollie (Jun 22, 2014)

For the purpose of having an easier manageable structure and data sort in place, I would create 2 partitions. Whether they are sized 3.5TB and 500GB, 3TB and 1TB or any other which way is up to you.

Performance issue related - not really a major issue, though there is some lag.

Does this new drive also contain your Operating System?


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## brianwall (Oct 17, 2011)

No, the OS is on an SSD. The consensus seems to be a few partions and then folders. No one has commented on mapping folders to drive letters though. Is this efficient?


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