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How is it possible to partition a HDD without corrupting its contents?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Awesome question.
The operating system, or OS, really does not care about whether it is a hard drive or a solid state drive when moving around the partitions.
Say your hard drives are pools. One is filled with molasses, and the other has water. The partitions are like the ropes in the pool. Perhaps you have no ropes. Maybe you have three, but two are so close to the wall, and each other, that only a small amount of stuff could occupy those lanes.
That leaves you with one really large lane. That's your data partition.
Water or molasses, the ropes are the same.
I kinda really want a description of the mental model that led to "HDD can't do this but SSD can".
I think the idea comes from "HDD slow," as he was impressed with the speed it was happening at, especially if you think of it as requiring data to be moved around on the disk. It's not really intuitive to think of it as just a table on the disk somewhere that says which regions belong to which partition, and having those regions be anywhere on the disk.
Is that actually how it works? I thought that was only within the partition itself, while partitions are physically separate on the platter.
For SSD's, it's 100% a logical table, because data is stored all over the place for load balancing purposes, so it already uses a logical table to keep track of what each block is for at any given point in time.
For HDD's, historically they were physically separated, and they mostly are still, but there's still a logical table, and there's no reason the logical table can't say "Blocks 0 through 1234 and 2000 are part of partition 1" if you have something somewhere else that you want on that partition.