[Macworld]

Post your comments for How to partition an external hard drive here

[rameeti]

Please share a reason that a user would want to partition a drive. I understand that many years ago, this was necessary to properly use a drives capacity, but I fail to understand any worthy reason to do it with today's drives and operating systems. Partitioning a drive in my experience and that of many users I know, is that the partitioned drive will result in a partitions that were improperly guessed as to the size that they should be. ie. A user would think that they needed 50% for documents and 50% for an iTunes library but would later find that their guess was wrong and they now had a full partition on one half and a barely filled partition on the other half.

How is partitioning any better than merely creating folders for each division of documents or files and allowing the OS to provide the space as necessary within each folder that the user creates?

[rameeti]

I do understand and appreciate that some advanced users might need or want to create separate partitions for different versions of an operating system, but this article is written as if average users who would not have these advanced needs should be partitioning. Partitioning also used to be necessary for temporary files that could be then later quickly erased and not retain fragmented drives but this too has largely gone the way of the dodo and would only be for advanced users.

[moose_n_squirrel]

Mostly you're right, most users should not need to partition.

I do it because I test a lot of software and I need to be able to boot into a system that doesn't affect my production system. I can't put another bootable system into just a folder. Also I like to keep my test files on a third partition because then I can get to them from either system without worrying about account permissions. Then of course there is the Boot Camp partition that many need.

When a new OS X or major upgrade of anything comes out some people have problems, others in the forums are always quick to admonish, "You shoulda tested the new system before relying on it!" Well, the only way to test new software without risking your current setup is to put it on another volume, and since most Macs only take one internal drive, if your internal is big enough and you don't want to hang an external off your portable all day long, you should just partition that one big drive.

[brobdingnagian]

rameeti, on 22 April 2011 - 01:23 PM, said:

Please share a reason that a user would want to partition a drive. I understand that many years ago, this was necessary to properly use a drives capacity, but I fail to understand any worthy reason to do it with today's drives and operating systems. Partitioning a drive in my experience and that of many users I know, is that the partitioned drive will result in a partitions that were improperly guessed as to the size that they should be. ie. A user would think that they needed 50% for documents and 50% for an iTunes library but would later find that their guess was wrong and they now had a full partition on one half and a barely filled partition on the other half.

How is partitioning any better than merely creating folders for each division of documents or files and allowing the OS to provide the space as necessary within each folder that the user creates?

You pinned the tail on the donkey of my hesitation about partitioning. I'm afraid the space allocation will not work in the long run. Perhaps it would be marginally faster to put the OS and apps in a partition, but that is fraught with hazards.

Perhaps the main reason for Jane Blow to partition is to keep her porn collection from prying eyes.

[NathanParker]

Nice seeing a mini-demo of Lion. :-)

[applemanDesign]

I see that too…. X/VII

[DutchProf]

rameeti, on 22 April 2011 - 01:23 PM, said:

Please share a reason that a user would want to partition a drive. I understand that many years ago, this was necessary to properly use a drives capacity, but I fail to understand any worthy reason to do it with today's drives and operating systems. Partitioning a drive in my experience and that of many users I know, is that the partitioned drive will result in a partitions that were improperly guessed as to the size that they should be. ie. A user would think that they needed 50% for documents and 50% for an iTunes library but would later find that their guess was wrong and they now had a full partition on one half and a barely filled partition on the other half.

How is partitioning any better than merely creating folders for each division of documents or files and allowing the OS to provide the space as necessary within each folder that the user creates?

Another reason is to have two (or even more) different versions of MacOSX that you can select from. I use Keynote to present, and after Apple updated 10.5.2, I ran into a serious problem with projection brightness dimming significantly with some projectors (> 30%). To date, that remains unaddressed. (Don't ask how long it took to figure out it was an OS related problem - but eventually we could replicate it: upgrade>dark; revert to 10.5.2: bright). Anyway, for a long time I was afraid to upgrade and kept using 10.5.2. After partitioning, one partition has the most current version of OSX (and , more importantly all security upgrades), and one that runs 10.5.2. When presenting, I reboot into the latter and can use any lecture hall they throw at me, while the other partition is my 'workhorse'. Even better, periodically I can test the new OS to see if this issue has finally been resolved [it hasn't - :-( ].

[sandman619]

My internal drive is partitioned, with the second smaller partition used as an emergency start-up drive. This way, if something goes awry with my main start-up drive, I can easily reboot from this second partition & perform disk repairs that can not be done on the live start-up drive. I can create this myself or have a drive utility app create an emergency drive, which will also make a bootable copy of the Mac OS & copy itself to this drive. When I only had the internal drive, this made things much easier should I have had an issue which required the use of a second start-up disk. It’s less cumbersome than booting up from the OS install DVD

Cheers !

[Fixx]

Do not partition just for fun. You just lose flexibility.
Reasons for partitioning:
1. TimeMachine. It will eat all space there is, so partition to limit it's appetite and save some storage space for other uses.
2. Other operating systems. Boot camp & other versions of OSX, linuxes etc for daring.
3. Partitions like FAT, NTFS for using disk with other OS'es.
In the olde days there used to be separate partitions for scratch or video in professional photo and video editing stations as they could be wiped clean easily to keep them fast. Nowadays pros just have separate disks if they need separate space.

[Robinthehood]

Iv'e never bothered to partition my time capsule or the desk top HD,... maybe I should have now that others have pointed out some very good scenarios to do so.
As far as I can remember there is a way to reallocate the size of the partition(s) after the fact with no changes or damage to the files stored. The name of the utility that does this escapes me right now but I'm sure this must ring a bell with someone else out there. If you can remember the name please help the ones who think this is not for them.

[talmy]

I've got only two reasons to partition an external drive:

1) Multiple boot partitions for different OSes or image backups of multiple systems.

2) Partition reserved for TimeMachine to keep it from gobbling up an entire drive.

Most users will never do (1) and should reserve a drive solely for TimeMachine. Just like the previous article on multiple partitions for the system drive, it's special needs only and most users are better served with a single partition.

[tronomagic]

Being an average user I didn't see the need to partition. I keep all the important documents on a seperate 60 gig ipod along with my music and pictures. When it came time to buy an external hard drive for back up purposes I just happened to see this article the same day I bought the drive. That was convienent.

This article was very helpful for me to learn to partiion an external drive using my Macbook Pro. I used it to partition a 2TB external into three drives; one for each computer in the household. I changed the size of each partition a lot higher than what any one of our computers can store on their current drives.

What's nice is that two of the computers are PC and I had no problem using my Mac to create the PC partitions that the other computers can read and write to while keeping one partition for the Mac and Time Machine.

Thanks Macworld!

[Tellyphoney]

tronomagic, on 27 April 2011 - 08:35 AM, said:

Being an average user I didn't see the need to partition. I keep all the important documents on a seperate 60 gig ipod along with my music and pictures. When it came time to buy an external hard drive for back up purposes I just happened to see this article the same day I bought the drive. That was convienent.

This article was very helpful for me to learn to partiion an external drive using my Macbook Pro. I used it to partition a 2TB external into three drives; one for each computer in the household. I changed the size of each partition a lot higher than what any one of our computers can store on their current drives.

What's nice is that two of the computers are PC and I had no problem using my Mac to create the PC partitions that the other computers can read and write to while keeping one partition for the Mac and Time Machine.

Thanks Macworld!