How necessary is it to reserve 15% disk space?

No, no no. Macs aren't peecees and neither are iPods. Partition is almost never needed and can cause more problems than it could potentially cure (less you're a developer or the like).
 
RacerX said:
I'd say defragging a drive is a bad idea. HFS+ (and Mac OS X) is designed to have a certain amount of disk fragmentation to protect against file fragmentation. Defrag utilities only care about making the drive look good, your actual files it could care less about.

Yep, if you don't have problems now, defragging is as good a way as any to create some.

Oddly enough, over the past 6 years the only people I work with who have had file system issues have been those who (against my recommendations) defrag their drives. Could be a coincidence... and then again. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Yes its my experience too that after a defrag of MacOSX It runs slower and have more problems then before.

I have 2.5 gigs of ram and my swap files still take up up to 3gig+ that I noticed so a 5-10gig free space is a great recommendation
 
Randman said:
No, no no. Macs aren't peecees and neither are iPods. Partition is almost never needed and can cause more problems than it could potentially cure (less you're a developer or the like).
Click to expand...

I develop software. Does that count? ;) Still doesn't address whether you can use a separate partition for the swap files though.
 
I ran the swap files on a separate partition in the early OSX-days, and it worked just fine. Didn't make anything faster or slower and didn't damage anything or give any performance enhancements or degradations.

My main gripe with partitions is that it leaves you with less available space, partly because some is wasted in creating the partitions in the first place, and partly because you will have some unused space on one volume, and some on another.

So, if you work with large files, chances are that you would end up with files that could fit in a space equal to the sum total of free space on your two partitions, but not in the free space on one of them, which essentially means you can't save your file anywhere... kind of sucks when you render video...
 
You have the added drawback of having less space for music or document files, and you have to always remember where you're putting files you save, since you now have TWO user account folder locations, etc.
 
elander - how did you go about doing that? Did you use different mount points, or symlinks, or what?

No, you shouldn't see any performance changes at all - unless the startup drive starts getting very full, perhaps because some app is malfunctioning and filling up log files. Then you'd see a pronounced lack of dire trouble, as compared with not partitioning.

True about files not fitting in places - you're giving up some storage space for a little extra robustness. Probably only a big issue on servers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top