Windows – Why have multiple partitions on a windows server

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With my IT outfit, we have templates to deploy servers with a dinky C drive/partition (10GB) and a larger D drive/partition. Why do this? Windows (at least until recently and at that minimally) has no real use of dynamic mount points in general server deployments.

Edit

So with many of the comments below a synopsis:

  1. It's faster to recover a smaller partition. This includes a corruption of NTFS,which would be kept to a paticular partition instead of messing up the enitre system.
  2. You get some protection from runnaway processes. This includes the ability to set quotas.
  3. Provides some cost savings for Raid configuration
  4. A religious hold over from the days before virtualization, raids, and high bandwidth networks.

Aside from #3 ( which, I think, is an argument against partitions), I still see no reason to have separate partitions. If you want to protect your data, wouldn't you just put it on another set of real or virtual disks or otherwise map to a shared resource somwhere else (NAS, SAN, whatever)?

Best Answer

To stop data filling up your operating system volume and crashing the server.

File servers benefit from separate volumes if you use quotas, as these are usually set per volume. (e.g. Put your user's home directories on one volume, profiles on another, company data on another etc.)

p.s. 10Gb sounds too small for a system volume. After several years of windows updates and service packs, that will soon fill up.

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