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Why?
Authored by: TheSpoonman on Nov 30, '04 08:53:42AM

Why do people still partition drives to separate data? Back in the day I used to use multiple partitions when drive space was small and expensive. However, today the smallest drive I have in my house is 60G, and even that is way too big for the machine it is in. Every time I've bothered to implement some kind of partitioning scheme, I've always found it more trouble than it was worth...one partition would start filling up too fast and I'd have to juggle data to get some free space when I really needed it.

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Answering the age-old question: which is more painful, going to work
or gouging your eye out with a spoon?
www.workorspoon.com



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Why?
Authored by: merlyn on Nov 30, '04 09:14:51AM

I have two partitions, the boot partition which is HFS+, and a UFS partition for those miscellaneous Unix tools that I download that may or may not understand the unfortunate case-insensitivity of HFS+. When I jump to a new laptop, I make a guess on how big the second partition must be, because the work of transferring 60GB back and forth takes the better part of a day, and I don't want to kill many days. This program looks like a god-send... I could reconfigure my UFS partition much more dynamically.



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Why?
Authored by: Franco on Dec 03, '04 04:34:24AM

Unfortunately, UFS is not supported. It will eventually be, if request will be high enough. I've already contact the developers showing my interest...



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Why?
Authored by: macshome on Nov 30, '04 09:17:29AM

Well, one good reason is if you are using disk quotas. Since quotas are volume based and all...

Another good reason is to be able to resize the volume if you add drives to an Xserve RAID and don't also have Xsan to increase the volume size.



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Why?
Authored by: daily on Nov 30, '04 09:21:05AM

I like to partion my drives to keep my OS seperate from all my other data, which makes for a very simple/painless clean install, without having to shift around countless gigs of my portfolio, itunes and iphoto library... not that I have had to do a clean install for a couple of years, perhaps I will when Tiger comes out... would it make any difference? I have installed 10, 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 over each other with little ill effect.

+daily



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Why?
Authored by: pub3abn on Nov 30, '04 09:27:41AM

Multiple partitions are a good organizational method. I personally don't like having tons of folders in a single root listing, and neither do I like rummaging through nested folders more than necessary. Partitions are an easy way to address this.

Partitions also separate your data, so that if there should be some sort of file or directory corruption, it doesn't necessarily affect everything. I've experienced directory corruption before, but fortunately I had to reformat only the one bad partition, and not the whole drive. All my other data was safe.



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Why?
Authored by: TheSpoonman on Nov 30, '04 09:33:27AM

I'm relatively new to OSX, so forgive my ignorance...do partitions show up on the desktop as separate drives, or aren't they mounted as part of the filesystem? When I think of multiple partitions in a Unix environment, I'm thinking of /usr/local or /home being mounted via NFS, in which case the directories are mounted to the root tree, anyway.

Aside from that, if they do show up as separate drives, how is that different from just having an alias to your data folders?

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Answering the age-old question: which is more painful, going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon?
www.workorspoon.com



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Why?
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Nov 30, '04 12:44:26PM
I'm relatively new to OSX, so forgive my ignorance...do partitions show up on the desktop as separate drives, or aren't they mounted as part of the filesystem? When I think of multiple partitions in a Unix environment, I'm thinking of /usr/local or /home being mounted via NFS, in which case the directories are mounted to the root tree, anyway.

Aside from that, if they do show up as separate drives, how is that different from just having an alias to your data folders?

On a Mac, either running OS X or OS 9 and earlier, partitions show up as separate drives, or more correctly separate volumes, since Mac OS doesn't show the drive, just the volume, i.e. you see a CD, but not the CD drive.

To answer the second question, I used to partition my disks, but after a while I always found I needed more room on one partition, and less on an other, and so on, so I have stopped partitioning drives at all.

While is it helpful from a maintenance point of view, I haven't had a need for it. I just boot my Mac from a custom made BootCD with both DiskWarrior and Drive 10. I think booting from a partition on the same hard drive that contains your main boot partition to fix that drive is not a great idea, since you are still on the same physical hard drive.


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G4/466, 1 GB, Mac OS X 10.3.6

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Why?
Authored by: dantrey on Nov 30, '04 10:57:27AM

I use a small partition (3.5 GB) as an alternate boot in order to run Diskwarrior, Tech Tool Pro 4, etc on my main working partition. It makes the everyday maintenance tasks so much easier.



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Why?
Authored by: TheSpoonman on Nov 30, '04 11:56:31AM

Now, that's a great reason! I'll have to look into trying that out myself.

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Answering the age-old question: which is more painful, going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon?
www.workorspoon.com



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Why?
Authored by: cshuman on Nov 30, '04 03:36:17PM

I had a drive with 2 partitions, System and Users. The drive went bad and the computer wouldn't boot. It just kept making a sound like a spring being flicked, kind of a twangy sound and then nothing. I installed the os on a new drive and put the old drive in as a secondary. Although the entire System partition was gone the the Users partition would still mount to allow me to save all the important stuff. The system isn't important in an instance like this. I have partitioned the same way on every subsequent install.

Chris

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Is there anybody out there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home?



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Why?
Authored by: jackAlbright on Nov 30, '04 03:46:17PM

I do Mac support in a corporate setting. We use partitioning to make it easier to reimage systems. Its much faster to copy user data to the second partition, or just have the user put it there in the first place. Some people have lots of iTunes music, for instance, and we were finding that it really drained our time to have to copy the files to an external Firewire drive and then copy back again.
On my Mac at home, I haven't bothered partitioning, but now that I think about it, I think I should (for the reason stated above)



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Why?
Authored by: JohnnyMnemonic on Dec 01, '04 09:44:59PM

I'm in a similar situation. We find that making a boot partition of just an OS and a few utilities on a Firewire drive allows us to boot to that, do repairs if necessary, and then run Carbon Copy Cloner to suck off the user's data.

Although I believe you can make a single .dmg or restore image with CCC, I've always found it much easier to clone their data to the second partition on the FW HD



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Why?
Authored by: cheeseworm on Dec 01, '04 04:24:56AM

I have a partition which I use for video capture. That's all it's used for, and when I need to capture video it makes it very simple to ensure I have contiguous disk space available without having to mess around with disk defragging.



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Why?
Authored by: bignumbers on Dec 01, '04 12:35:30PM

To add to the "why partition" discussion - I do this to have multiple bootable OS versions. I have customers with various OS X versions and want to have a machine that looks like any of them. Plus I keep one very generic OS install for diskwarrior-type fixes.

So I might have partitions for 10.3, 10.3 Server, development build of 10.4, plus a very plain 10.3. Sometimes I'll even set up a duplicate OS of a customer's machine to test out peculiar software or problems, change an OS setting (like LDAP logins at book), etc.

I can't see much of a reason to split data across partitions. Some advantages in terms of data loss risk reduction but in general I keep all my data together, on the main partition I use for my main OS.



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Why?
Authored by: Chuck Jonah on Dec 01, '04 01:08:36PM

One big advantage of partitioning is to keep the system partition reasonably small. Before I update a system, I clone it (CCC) to another disk and then update it. I then always have a way back if I don't like the update. With a partition, I don't have to clone so much.



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Why?
Authored by: IanWalker on Dec 13, '04 12:16:01PM

Personally, I keep 3 partitions on my iBook -
1) an OSX partition for the OS and most of my apps
2) an OS9 partition for a few reasons:
for verifying hardware (example: a card reader I couldn't get to work in OSX worked fine in OS9, indicating a definate driver issue)
for running OS9 apps that will not run in Classic mode (ProTools is a good example)
3) a seperate partition for my media files - makes for easy organization, and prevents each of the Systems from writing to the other (hopefully keeps things a bit cleaner).

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Ian!



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I partition for Clean-up reasons
Authored by: drdarrow on Jan 07, '05 07:40:23PM

I have partitions for Video Work. I have them set to 30+ Gigs each... When I have nessed with a bunch of files for a while, burned my DVDs and backed up what I need, I just use the Disk Utility to Erase that partition. It erases everything in 5 seconds, and it's like putting in a virgin hard-drive every time I start a new project. No digital scum left over; fresh directory tables, etc.



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