More on Mac drive partitioning

A few quick follow-ups from last week. Many readers had much more to say about Mac drive partitioning (TTOTD 12/1/00). Suffice to say a number of readers feel it is better to partition large volumes. We already made the point that some users have multiple partitions because it makes it easier to run utilities for defragmenting and such. Nevertheless, a number of readers felt compelled to make this point again so we think it is worth reiterating as an advantage. Other readers report they get better drive performance (read more tracks) out of partitioned drives. This has not been our experience on optimized, well-maintained drives, but we acknowledge it as a possibility. Let’s face it, systems are all different and you are well-served to experiment with these types of things. Again, the points we made in the tip last week clearly stated there was an assumption that system files were on a separate drive, as they should be, so many of what would otherwise be ‘features’ of partitioned drives aren’t as important. Performance issues aside, it basically comes down to user preferences. Is it better to you to be able to have all the space at once, organizing it with folders, or to be able to copy from one partition to another (data redundancy) and run file utility programs selectively? You decide. As for the performance aspect, there are no hard conclusions. Some evidence shows there is better performance when drives are not partitioned, and other evidence suggests otherwise. Feel free to test this on your own system. I think we can put this topic to bed for the time being.