Can I partition a hard drive and keep files on separate partition?

That is, can I partition a hard drive and have the system software on one drive, and everything else on the other? That is, have the system software on one drive, and on the other have pictures, music, documents, and all other files other than the system software? Thanks. David

Hi GK1951, and a warm welcome to the forums!
Great question, as a matter of fact it does... or would, but the Devil is in the Details as they say.
IME, OSX works best with 100+GB free disk space, so if that partition scheme cuts that down then you'll lose speed, but ony a few would notice the diff until you get down to 30 GB free space.
I can't say much, but my VM at the moment is 143.55 GB, I've been told that isn't a real number, but hey, it means something!
But there are so many factors affecting this that really, the only rule that seems to hold is Give OSX as much HD Free Space as you can & it'll be happy.
I imagine on the MacPro you could say use the outer Partition of several Disks... one for the OS, one for VM, one for APPs, etc. and gain the most!
Maybe these will help...
iMac/24"/2.4 GHz/4GB RAM/320 GB SATA drive, You can see that Cached values account for more than the Zone on the HD really.
Little 4K Random R&Ws suffer greatly no matter what...

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