[Freeflyer]

Hi all,

just taken delivery of a 120Gb external firewire drive for my powerbook. Disk utility (which I've never used) gives me the option to partition the drive.

It's not going to be used for anything except storage and my 40Gb itunes library.

Is there any reason to partition the drive into smaller sections? I don't think it's necessary, but wondered what you thought.

Thanks,

J.

[mrmister]

Not on an external, that I can think of.

[CatOne]

I'd just use one big partition, if you're always gonna use it from the Mac.

[TheBum]

The only good reasons I can think of why you'd want to partition it are:

1. You want it to support multiple machines or operating systems (as CatOne implied).

2. You want to limit your loss in case of a serious disk problem. In all likelyhood, only data on the partition where the disk problem occurred would be lost if the problem was not recoverable.

One big reason not to partition is if you're going to use it to capture digital video. AFAIK, neither iMovie nor Final Cut Pro/Express can capture video across partition boundaries.

[ixus_123]

I would partition it. I have a 60gig external firewire drive that is partioned for organisation mostly.

There a 10gig partition that I use to make a mirror copy (using carbon copy cloner) before do any system updates, and also periodically.

30gig for itunes alone

the rest for anything else - programs I don't use often, files, EyeTV video cache etc

Apart from the backup part the other partitions are just to help me organise really.