[Veltliner]

I usually partition my external hard drives if they are 500 Gb or larger.

I once read that access time is shorter on a partitioned disc as the root directory is smaller.

Is this true?

Or is this outdated?

Does it still make sense to partition an external hard drive?

From a practical standpoint I don't really care. It may even easier to create a folder structure if I had one big 500Gb disc.

So, is it still recommended to partition external hard drives?

[CharlesS]

The advantage is that you can install OS installations on the other partitions. If you want to have a rescue partition to boot from which has all your disk utilities such as DiskWarrior, etc. on it, if you're a developer and want to have several different versions of OS X to boot from to make sure your software works with them, if you have an ADC Select account and want to try out a seed version of a future OS X version, or if you want to dual-boot another operating system such as Linux, then partitioning may be a good idea. Other than that, though, there's not much advantage to it.

[Veltliner]

So, CharlesS, there is no speed gain when you access a file on a partition of a disc, compared to accessing this file on a whole, unpartitioned disc?

In this case: "Unpartitioned we stand!"

[CharlesS]

Not anything you'll be likely to notice.