If you have never heard of a harddisk partition until now, don't worry, you're not alone.  Disk partitioning simply refers to the dividing of a hard disk drive into lots of smaller virtual hard disk drives.  All of these little virtual hard disk drive are called hard disk partitions.  How do you do this you ask?  Good question.  You need to buy a software program that is specifically designed to get the job done.  Once you do it, you'll have to buy a separate software program to delete the partitions.

                So you may be asking yourself why you want to create a hard disk partition on your hard drive.  There are several different advantages to doing this.

• Buy separating the operating system and the programs files from the user files, your clones will be made of the operating system and installed software only.
• If you have cache and log files on your hard drive, they can change in size very quickly and can fill up the file system.  Adding a hard disk partition will keep them separate.
• You will have your own little hard drive area that is solely for the operating systems memory and swapping paging.
• You can keep programs that you use often near each other.
• You can use multibooting setups.  This would allow you to run Mac and Microsoft on the same computer.  The different hard disk partitions can use any operating system as long as the hardware supports it.
• You can protect your files.  This is really effective if you end up with a corrupt file or system installation.  If you corrupt one hard disk partition, the others won't be affected.
• You can “Short Stroke”.  This is a process that tries to minimize head repositioning delays that drive down performance on your hard drive.
• You can make your computer's overall performance a lot more efficient.  The small hard drive partitions for better than the larger ones when you are using certain file systems. 

As I previously mentioned, there are several different software programs that you can use to divide up your hard drive.  If you don't know how to do it yourself, call around your local area to find tech guys that are familiar with the programs.  If you're feeling semi comfortable with the software, you can Google your specific software online and find a website that will give you directions as to how to install it.