Hi everyone.
What is the difference between the OS (C:) vs DATA (D:) drives on a laptop. Are they for different things? Can D not be used for games and things like C? Why is D so much larger?
In: Technology
It’s just two separate drives. The separation can be physical (i.e. The drives are two physically separate drives) or it can be logical (there’s only one actual physical drive, split into two partitions).
If the separation is logical, then it’s entirely up to whoever installed the machine. It’s common to make a smaller partition for the operating systems and some of the installed software, and a larger partition for all the data – documents, pictures, videos and such. That way you can easily delete the entire system partition without touching the data partition (for example if you want to reinstall your operating system from scratch) However this separation isn’t required – it’s also possible to have just one drive with just one partition which holds everything, both the programs and the data.
Nowadays computers often come with two drives – an SSD (solid state drive) and an HDD (hard disk drive). SSDs are faster but smaller and more expensive than HDDs, so you usually have a small SSD for the operating system and programs (which benefit from fast access to the drive) and a large HDD for the data (which doesn’t need to be as fast).
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