A Hard Drive Divided; Partitioning

Q: Steve, I’m having a new hard drive installed in my MacBook Pro. Since it’s a larger drive, a friend said I should partition the drive into two volumes. One volume would be for my normal system, applications and documents and another volume for a spare system to boot from should I have problems with my main volume. Someone else I consulted thought that was a bad idea but couldn’t explain why, at least in a way that made sense to me...

Can you shed some light on this?

A: In my opinion, taking a new drive and partitioning it is a bad idea. 

For those who don’t know what a partition is, it’s when you take a new drive (or wipe out a hard drive and restore it “data free” to its original state), then cut it up into virtual pieces. For example, you buy a 500Mb hard drive. Most of the time it’s partitioned as one drive; 500Mb. But you could cut it up in to two or more drives, a 250Mb partition, a 125Mb partition and a 125Mb partition. All three parts equal 500Mb. You would see 3 Hard drives on your desktop although you only have one hard drive inside your machine. You could do this, but why?

Note: Many PC’s are sold this way with a hidden “D”, “E” or “F” drive. It’s called a “recovery partition”, but note that a lot of computers today are sold with a smaller partition that has the operating system recovery on it.  Often this is in place of providing the recovery on another media like CD or DVD.  Often you are given the opportunity to make at least one copy of that media on CD or DVD as well.  These recovery partitions sometime show as another drive, or are sometimes hidden, and are usually four to eight gigabytes in size.

In my view, making another partition is another potential problem that can go wrong. Backing up to the same drive also is not a good idea. If the drive dies, then all the partitions are gone. You lose everything. Having a divided drive now requires double the maintenance and double the risk something could go wrong. Also you won’t have the full size of the drive you’ve bought.

So unless you’ve got a unique reason to partition a drive, I say “no”.