Are More Partitions Beneficial for HDDs Compared to SSDs?

Partitioning HDDs is sort of like using SLI with GPUs—all about maximizing performance. The theory is that having everything in one place can improve efficiency, but with SSDs, that benefit disappears since they can access data so quickly anywhere on the drive. If you're thinking about partitioning an HDD, just keep in mind that performance is good enough on modern drives that it may not really matter.

Honestly, I’ve never found partitioning worth the trouble. With my SSD, a full Windows 11 install takes only about 20-25 minutes, so I prefer a clean install for everything. Plus, I don’t keep important stuff solely on my PC anyway.

When it comes to PCs, it’s generally better to have two separate drives rather than splitting one drive into partitions. Back in the day, people used to partition drives because the outer sections were faster, but then you end up running out of space for apps. Some apps have to stay on the OS partition which makes it tricky. For laptops, I’d skip partitions—laptop drives are usually too small for that anyway. Just use one partition and maybe get an external drive for backups.

Back in the day, having partitions helped with speed since it took less time to seek a partition than to dive deep into the file system. However, with modern HDDs having much faster seek times—around 4ms—this difference has become negligible. So, partitioning for speed is less of a concern now.

For HDDs, the performance varies based on where the data is stored on the platters—inner sectors are slower compared to outer ones. However, for SSDs, this isn’t an issue, since access times are nearly identical across the board. Data storage won’t improve seek times on SSDs, especially with a DRAM cache since the system randomizes it anyway.