We see a lot of hard disks in the market today that come in large sizes. We see 80 gigabyte hard drives up to 160 gigabyte. That is quite a large storage capacity if you compare it to the old ones we have some years back and one thing you should be aware of is that the larger the storage, the risky it is as far as perhaps losing data once the hard disk crashes or breaks down.
The best way to go about it is to partition the hard drives into smaller parts. For example, you can partition an 80 gigabyte hard disk into 2 40 gigabytes or even 4 20 gigabyte drives. As you can see, even in smaller partitions, they are still big and normally for most operating systems like Windows Vista or Windows XP, the most you would need would be about 4 gigabyte at the most.
When it comes to installing software, you can install it on the other drive letters assigned. For example, you can install MS Office in drive D or an anti-virus software in drive E. This helps ensure that you are balancing the applications you are installing which in the end can save you the trouble of losing space.
For documents, you don’t have to always follow the usual My Documents on the C drive. You can configure it in a way that it is saved on the other drives. Or if you are lazy to configure, the beauty of partitioning is that you can easily transfer in between drives so that if crashes occur you can retrieve the files and transfer them via DOS or Windows.
Partitioning can be done on the setup menu during your first installation of Windows. Decide and then assign what partition size you want and then install from there.