How do *you* partition your drive?

Viro

Viro

Registered
Currently, I have my hard disk in 1 big partition that takes up all the space. I'd like to know if this is efficient. In Linux, I have 4 partitions(/home /boot /swap and /) and I'd like to hear from people how they manage their partitions on OS X.

I've got a 60 GB disk to play with, so suggestions would be much appreciated.
 
I run a 120 GB drive with no partitions and have no issues at all. panther seems to love lots of free drive space and I always try to never have less than 20 GB free.

any os that uses drive journaling will be fine without partitions. does linux? I know unix bsd much better than linux.
 
Try doing a search...this topic was extensively covered a while ago. From what I remember, it was a majority towards no-partitions.

I personally won't partition a drive unless absolutely necessary. The beige is, but it's unavoidable sine OS X on those machines has to be placed within the first 8gb of the drive.
 
I have a 60GB main drive, no partitions, not needed.
I have two other internal drives for storage and backup.
 
I partitioned my 80GB drive into one 20GB and one 60GB drive. This helps especially when I want to repair my disks without the use of a start up cd. We all know those cds can get lost!

It sucks when you want to actually use your "system" drive (the 20GB) one to store all your music and "home" files, but I have gotten used to setting my "storage" drive for all these things.

Overall I recommend partitioning mainly because you can very quickly and easily back up files and if a program gets corrupted you can copy your fresh version from "storage" directly to "system". It's helped me just recently, in fact.
 
You can partiton however you want, but I would suggest installing OS X completely on one partition. Dont' move your swap file -- there's no performance increase from that. Let OS X do its own thing -- it does it very well.

If you have a lot of music files or pictures or something, that might be a good case to make like a 20GB OS X partition and a 40GB photos/music partiton, because then you could reformat and reinstall OS X at your leisure without losing both of those. That's what I do -- except instead of partitions, I use whole drives. One partition per drive, one use for each partition (OS X, documents, media).
 
My understanding is that the journaling features of the new HFS+ is not a "true" journaling FS, but does it really matter? To me it doesn't, I reformatted my new iBook into one partition and use the older non journaled FS. Journaling helps keep the integrity of the FS, it doesn't mean it'll backup your files or really project from data loss in a corrupt FS. ReiserFS journals and I've heard horror stories about that. My rule is to just back up my files. If the FS borks, it's gonna get borked. For backup I just burn DVDs or put it on my FW hard drive.

As for Linux, yes Linux has had journaling filesystems for quite a long time. Single partitions is quite common too, the only reason some Linux systems are set up in multiple partitions is: well /boot in particular is in its own partition and at boot time the bootloader reads the kernel image from /boot and then unmounts it. /boot doesn't remain mounted at runtime for security purposes, don't want your kernel to get corrupted or hit with a virus, hacked, etc.
 
40 GB HD on PBook.
20 G on iPod.
40 GB on ext FW.
no partitions. I might make a 5-10 G partition to the ext FW so I can run Linux at work..
 
Ah well, I'll just stick with a single partition then. I've got most of my data backed up on an external drive anyway, so partitioning in order to do a backup is a bad idea.
 
I can tell you right now that no one here is using only one partition.

Even if you think your entire OS X installation is on one partition, or you think you only created one partition on your hard drive, there are actually about seven or eight partitions on your drive, including the big one you made as well as several other smaller partitions created by the filesystem.

Just for clarification. So when we want to say, "one big partition," from now on, we can actually say, "you know, the standard seven or eight partitions."

;) Just to be anal about it... hehe...
 
Ok, if you want to be "anal" about it: the filesystem did not create those partitions. Disk Manager did. Filesystems don't and shouldn't modify the partition table.
 
Ah, yeah yeah yeah... hehe... I was be facetious... :D Perhaps I should have said "created for the filesystem." I guess if I'm gonna be that retentive then I should check my own words sometimes... :P

To keep this on-topic, I don't have any of my drives partitioned into more than one user partition (let's not propagate this "there are actually seven blah blah blah" stuff anymore, less this thread go WAY off topic). I have multiple drives, and I find that to be best for me. One drive holds OS X, the other drives hold various stuff -- one for audio/video, another for documents and software updaters. If one ever goes out, then I open the case, release a screw and replace the drive with a fresh one. 15 minutes downtime, at the most.

Partitioning drives is great, but if the drive fails, then you've lost ALL partitions.

In the end, though, it's all a matter of preference, and system speed ain't gonna be increased either way. Hell, even moving swap files to a different partition now doesn't speed the system up, even on machines with minimal amounts of RAM.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
If one ever goes out, then I open the case, release a screw and replace the drive with a fresh one. 15 minutes downtime, at the most.
Click to expand...
Not if it's your OSX drive that goes out, you'd have to reinstall the OS which is upwards to about an hour. Setting up everything to your liking could take up to another hour depending on how much tweaking you like to do.

ElDiabloConCaca said:
In the end, though, it's all a matter of preference, and system speed ain't gonna be increased either way. Hell, even moving swap files to a different partition now doesn't speed the system up, even on machines with minimal amounts of RAM.
Click to expand...
Moving the swap file can be beneficial if you put it on a seperate drive, on a completely different bus (secondary IDE). Even on a seperate partition, the drive will still be accessed so you're right, there's no performance gain there. Off-loading the swap file onto a difference bus will put less stress on one single channel.
 
Lycander said:
Not if it's your OSX drive that goes out, you'd have to reinstall the OS which is upwards to about an hour. Setting up everything to your liking could take up to another hour depending on how much tweaking you like to do.
Click to expand...

Well, if it's the OS X drive that goes out, then it's a simple restore from a backup with CCC or Disk Utility -- everyone does have a backup, right? Without one, you're asking for trouble. Anyone without a system backup that uses their machine for any kind of school or work is foolish, in my opinion. That's like setting off on a long road trip with 1/8 of a tank of gas and no money.

So, if OS X goes out, it's about a 20 minute restore process.

Lycander said:
Moving the swap file can be beneficial if you put it on a seperate drive, on a completely different bus (secondary IDE). Even on a seperate partition, the drive will still be accessed so you're right, there's no performance gain there. Off-loading the swap file onto a difference bus will put less stress on one single channel.
Click to expand...

True, but the performance gain from doing that will be unnoticeable. If you're running a system with so little RAM that it's frequently reading from and writing to the swap files, then it's not gonna matter where the swap file is -- on the system disk, on a separate bus, etc., it's still gonna be THAT damn slow.

I fiddled with this with the OS X Public Beta and 10.0 and a tiny bit with 10.1, and moving the swap file to a different partition/bus provides no perceivable improvement. In theory, yes, it should offer some level of improvement, but when actually implemented, there's no benefit. Sounds good on paper, though. It was kind of neat to say, "Hey, look what I did! I moved the swap file!" though. The "stress" of swapping isn't as great as we'd like to think it is. It's a regular read/write to the hard drive, and if your system has to swap out constantly, it's still gonna hang whether the swap file is on the OS X drive or somewhere else.

On a system that very infrequently accesses the swap file, moving the swap file will still get you no performance increase, because you're only accessing the swap file once in a blue moon (or very infrequently, take your pick). When it's that infrequent, a nanosecond or two improvement in hard drive access time is imperceivable.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Anyone without a system backup that uses their machine for any kind of school or work is foolish, in my opinion.
Click to expand...
I thought Macs were suppose to be more reliable than PCs? :p
 
no technology of any kind is a 100% sure thing. macs are simply about as close as you can get to perfect when it comes to computers.
 
Lycander said:
I thought Macs were suppose to be more reliable than PCs? :p
Click to expand...

The Macintosh OS in inherently more stable than most Microsoft OSs, but when was the last time you saw an Apple-branded hard drive?
 
Yep, we're talking hard drives here -- hard drives crashing. Apple doesn't make hard drives, so the quality of Apple's products is not in question, since the hard drive going bad hinges on the manufacturer of the hard drive, not Apple.

And yeah, someone can come back with "well, isn't the whole just the sum of its parts?" but since PCs use the exact, same hard drives, we can't really use that to discredit Apple because then we'd have to discredit PCs at the same time. It just brings them both down a point.
 
Actually I do have a bone to pick with Dell about hard drives. They use these thin hard drives. It's still 3.5" wide like standard hard drives, but it's about half the thickness. I had bought such a hard drive a few years ago from a computer fair. It sucked big time and I swore never to use them again. Bought a new Dell since then and open it up, what do I see? That same skinny crappy hard drive. And it's in every new Dell computer I've opened up.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top