Meaning – The term partition, refers to a section of a storage device, such as a hard diskdisk drive or solid-state drive. It is treated by the operating system as a separate logical volume, which makes it function similar to a separate physical device.
A storage device may be formatted with one or more partitions. Some operating systems, such as Windows and Linux require multiple partitions, while others like macOS may only require one.
Partitioning a disk can make it easier to organize files, such as video and photo libraries, especially if you have a large hard drive. Creating a separate partition for your system files (the startup disk) can also help protect system data from corruption since each partition has its own file system.
Example of usage – “Older operating systems only allowed you to partition a disk during the formatting or reformatting process. This meant you would have to reformat a hard drive (and erase all of your data) to change the partition scheme.”
