A reserved part of a storage drive (hard disk, SSD) that is treated as a separate drive. Even a single drive that takes all the storage space is assigned a partition. For example, early Windows PCs came with the entire disk partitioned as drive C:. New Windows PCs often come with the storage drive partitioned into C: and D:. The main drive is C:, and D: contains a recovery system in the event Windows has to be re-installed. In addition, users may wish to have several drives for organizational purposes, and utility programs come with every computer for adding and modifying partitions. See
primary partition,
extended partition,
basic disk and
dynamic disk.