why partition

I don't recall seeing a why we need to partition drives. Partitioning came into play when the switch was made 10+ years ago from RLL/MFM drives to IDE drives. It is part of the design specification of the IDE standard.

Some general comments as to why the drive mfg doesn't partition the drive for you;

First, there are numerous ways that you might decide to set up the drive.
The mfg has no way of knowing what you are going to do with the drive, so they cannot set up the drive for you.You might want to set up the drive with a single partition. Someone else might want / need to set up the drive with 5 partitions and 10 logical drives.

There are also different file structures for the partition for different operating systems.
Depending on what version of Windows you use, there are 3 primary, and a few secondary partition structures. (FAT16, FAT32, NTSF)
Linux uses a different structure. And I suspect Apple uses yet another.

In the end, it boils down to cost and convienience.

The manufacture saves cost by not having to spend the time partitioning the drive. And saves even more cost by not having to mfg and stock 10 or more different drive partition structure models.

You get the convienience of being able todecide how you want to use the drive.

I don't recal if there is any historical or theory posted, but you might look through the links at the fdisk section of www.fdisk.com/fdisk
and http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/part.htm

Chas

Will be to organize the information. A partition to run all aplications in relation to your work, ie photoshop,etc. one more to copy docs, other to run games. is an option.

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