While it used to be pretty common for advanced computer users to partition drives for performance reasons, that's less common now. Some use partitions as a strategy for organizing their media or to create an additional bootable backup of the operating system. Partitioning separates sections of the drive from each other so each has its own volume information and directory.
It's possible to partition a drive so the computer sees it as two or more volumes.
The most common volume structure for a single hard drive is a single partition, where the drive appears to the computer to be a single drive.
