[X Newbies] Partitioning Drive?

[Randy B. Singer]

Steven Rogers said:

>>>> Unless you have some specific reason why you need to partition it, 
>>>> you should leave it the way Apple sends it to you, ie unpartitioned. 
>>>> IMHO.
>>>
>>> I would concur with Charles. Especially because unless you know why 
>>> you're partitioning, you don't know how big to make the partitions.
>>
>> I disagree.
>>
>> For general use, I'd recommend partitioning the drive in 3 volumes.
>
>Why?  unless you're dumping raw partitions for backup, there's no 
>necessary relationship between what gets backed-up and partitions. A 
>"scratch" partition is a complete waste of time. I don't see that an 
>"emergency partition" gets you much. Most people are much better off 
>with a single volume.


I must concur.  Unless you are an expert user, and you have a lot of time 
to backup, restore, and repeat that until you find the optimal size for 
partitions, you should probably stay away from partitioning. 

It's true that if you have a huge hard drive that each of several 
partitions will be plenty big, but then you have wasted a lot of space in 
one or more of your partitions.

People who partition their drives for OS X seem to have occurrences of 
problems all out of proportion to those who do not. I just don't see the 
advantages of partitioning as being a worthwhile trade-off with respect 
to stability for ordinary (or, especially, newbie) users.

Which isn't to say that you shouldn't do it if you know what you are 
doing.  (And those of you who have already partitioned don't need to 
start writing posts says "I partitioned and it worked fine!". 
Partitioning can work out fine.  At least in the short term, until your 
partition becomes too full for the OS.)  Note that we are on a "Newbies" 
list, not an advanced list.

See:
http://www.macattorney.com/tutorial.html 
Item #12


Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

How To Deal With Common Macintosh OS X Jaguar Problems
http://www.macattorney.com/tutorial.html