The letter C was assigned to the first hard drive because A and B were reserved for floppy disks. Today, large hard drives are often partitioned, with each partition assigned a new drive letter. Some people create a small C: drive to hold DOS utilities and files to reduce the risk of malware attacks. Before partitioning a new hard drive, it’s important to consider different strategies for organizing data and adapting to different operating systems.
On computers, active storage drives are automatically assigned a drive letter, starting with the letter A. The DOS operating system followed the drive letter with a colon, as in A:. Before flash memory devices, computers incorporated floppy disk drives for portable storage, so drive letters A and B were retained by the system to be assigned to these devices. This left C as the first available hard drive letter. This is how the hard drive came to be known as the C: drive.
Hard drives used to be small enough not to be partitioned, so a single drive letter was sufficient. The operating system has always been installed on drive C: and virtually all instructions for software and device drivers also referred to by this name. Today is a different story.
Today’s hard drives are often several hundred gigabytes, or even up to a terabyte, and growing. Generally, computer users find it useful for organization to divide large disks into multiple partitions or sections. In some cases it is even required by the computer’s BIOS and/or operating system. With each additional partition created on the drive, the system assigns a new sequential drive letter which it manages as a separate storage device. Thus, a “C: drive” today might only refer to a very small portion of a much larger drive that houses several additional drive letters.
With the proliferation of computers has come exploitation by malicious hackers, malware, viruses and spyware. The C: drive is the common destination because it is the default drive for installing the operating system. For this reason, some security-minded people choose to create a small C: drive to hold some DOS utilities and other files, but install the main operating system on the D: drive. While this certainly doesn’t guarantee freedom from hackers, viruses, or malware, it does automatically eliminate those threats that target the drive as the place where the operating system will be found.
Before partitioning a new hard drive, it might be helpful to read about the different strategies people use to minimize risk, organize data, and adapt to different operating systems and purposes. Making the C: drive drastically reduced in size and retired from using keys is probably a wise option. However, games made for DOS require installation on the drive, so if you’re going to be using them make sure you allocate enough space. Also, some older software packages install automatically on the C: drive regardless of where the operating system is located.
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