Is disk partitioning recommended prior to (or during) loading Win10 on new pc with one M2 1TB SSD?

riotubes

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Hi, It's been 5 years since I last built a pc and loaded Windows. My son and I just finished building his gaming PC and want to load Win10 tomorrow. It has a single 1TB M2 SDD for OS, utilities, game downloads, MS Office and personal files. If I load Windows 10 from a bootable USB stick, will Windows Disc Management automatically partition the disk in an optimal way, or must I partition the disk manually and, if the latter, how many partitions and of what size? Finally, if this PC is mainly for gaming, schoolwork and streaming services (netflix via chromecast) is there a strong reason to buy Win10 Pro or will home edition be fine? We will be using WiFi for networking. PC: Ryzen 3600; Rog Strix B550 mobo; Sapphire Pulse 5600xt; EVO 9700 1TB M2 SSD. Thank you for your feedback.
 
Windows setup will take care of all the partitioning for you.

If you don't care about accessing the machine remotely using remote desktop, encrypting the drive using bit locker, or joining a domain, home will work just fine.
 
I recommend Pro if you like to alter OS settings, the Group Policy Editor allows you more control over telemetry snd automatic updates than Home.
 
It's absolutely not necessary. Every time I install Windows, I completely wipe the partitions by using the "clean" command through diskpart then install onto the unallocated disk allowing Windows to automatically create and format the volume.
 
I'm with JustLong. If this is a fresh install just run the OS installer and select the drive. Windows will handle the rest.

Home will be fine for what you are describing.
 
I used to always split up my drives into two partitions, but that was back in the spinner days. If you are only going to have one physical drive, there's no reason to partition it up. Let the Windows install routine handle the partitioning. but for me, I always hit ALT+F10 and convert the drive to GPT during the first few screens of the install process. Then, I exit out of the DOS prompt, and let Windows do it's thing.
 
I used to always split up my drives into two partitions, but that was back in the spinner days. If you are only going to have one physical drive, there's no reason to partition it up. Let the Windows install routine handle the partitioning. but for me, I always hit ALT+F10 and convert the drive to GPT during the first few screens of the install process. Then, I exit out of the DOS prompt, and let Windows do it's thing.
Yeah, now I have a 2tb ssd. I used to partition them so if I ever ran out of space I could throw another drive in, move everything from the d partition and rename the new drive d. But I don't think I will fill 2tb any time soon. Media files are all on spinners now.
 
Partitions can still be useful for one reason. If windows crashes and burns and a repair does not work, instead of going to get another drive, if you have partitions and all your pictures and other files are on say D:\ drive, you can just reinstall windows on C and not lose your files.

But, this day in age, you should be backing up your files via various methods, Cloud storage, external USB drives in rotation or something.
 
Partitions can still be useful for one reason. If windows crashes and burns and a repair does not work, instead of going to get another drive, if you have partitions and all your pictures and other files are on say D:\ drive, you can just reinstall windows on C and not lose your files.

But, this day in age, you should be backing up your files via various methods, Cloud storage, external USB drives in rotation or something.
I keep all my documents on Google drive and all my photos on onedrive. Well worth $2 a month or whatever I pay for the amount I have. I keep all the files locally on my desktop as well, and on cold storage.
 
Partitions can still be useful for one reason. If windows crashes and burns and a repair does not work, instead of going to get another drive, if you have partitions and all your pictures and other files are on say D:\ drive, you can just reinstall windows on C and not lose your files.

But, this day in age, you should be backing up your files via various methods, Cloud storage, external USB drives in rotation or something.
Technically true but you would have to have much bigger balls than me to try it lol. I would be using cmd to copy the partition I care about to an external or yanking the drive and backing it up in another PC before I try to reinstall Windows anyways.

IMHO in this day and age multiple partitions on a single drive is just a big PITA and I would only do it in very particular use cases. For a computer you just want to work without hyper managing install locations, moving user folder locations, etc. just leave it alone.
 
It's absolutely not necessary. Every time I install Windows, I completely wipe the partitions by using the "clean" command through diskpart then install onto the unallocated disk allowing Windows to automatically create and format the volume.

How is this done?

50-150GB C:\ for programs, rest on D:\
yes I have been doing this for years
I have a 256GB SSD for windows only the rest of my drives are hard disk drives you know those round spiny disk things.
My new notebook got a 1TB SSD 85GB for Windows rest for data different OS & data drives/partitions makes it easier to do a wipe and re-install (not as necessary much as it was back in the Windows 7/Vista/XP days) just make 100% sure multiple times you format the correct drive/partition.
 
How is this done?
Boot to windows installation media. Go through prompts. At the screen that says to select the disk, press Shift+F10 - type in diskpart - Type in list disk - find the disk you want to install Windows on (it's easy if you just unplug everything else) - type in select disk # where # is the disk### 1,2,3 etc. Typically that will be disk 0 - Then just type in clean - Close out window and press refresh on the disk selection screen

Keep in mind this does completely wipe out the disk.
 
Boot to windows installation media. Go through prompts. At the screen that says to select the disk, press Shift+F10 - type in diskpart - Type in list disk - find the disk you want to install Windows on (it's easy if you just unplug everything else) - type in select disk # where # is the disk### 1,2,3 etc. Typically that will be disk 0 - Then just type in clean - Close out window and press refresh on the disk selection screen

Keep in mind this does completely wipe out the disk.
Cool Thanks the SSD is disk 3 on my X570 Aorus taking an NVMe drive is not as easy as un doing a IDE (Yes I'm that old) or a SATA cable plus I don't know have many insertion/removal cycles that (cheap) socket is good for don't want to damage it or swap more then actually needed.
 
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