Modern computers need an ever growing volume of storage capacity. This applies to hard drives installed into computers as upgrades as well. If you’ve just fitted a 2 terabyte (TB) hard drive into your computer, the best approach is typically to split it into multiple partitions to make it easier to use.
Partitions are essentially virtual hard drives — sections of a single drive that, to the operating system, appear as separate physical drives. For example, you can turn one drive into the storage depot for photos and dedicate another for music. That makes selective backups easier to perform as well.
Windows 7 and Windows Vista both come with tools to divide hard drives into separate partitions. New partitions are created by opening the Disk Management utility. The utility can either be found in the Control Panel or by typing “partition” in the Start menu.
Once active, the utility shows the individual hard drives and disk drives available to the computer. Presuming you have a 1 or 2 TB hard drive and want to divide it into two partitions, you right-click the hard drive symbol and then click “Shrink Volume” from the pop-up menu.
Then decide how big the partition should be. The removed section is now shown as “unallocated storage space.” To use it, right click and select “Create new simple volume.” The partition is formatted and then appears under a new letter in the list of drives.