Should I Partition My Hardrive?

I just purchased a 160gb Western Digital hardrive. Before I install it on my macbook I wanted to know should I partition the hardrive? What are the benifits of doing that? I do have alot of music and will continue to add music. Please help!

"...What are the benifits of doing that?..."
You might get some small improvement in disc access times when reading from a smaller partition rather than the whole large disc. For example, you might boot a little bit faster from a small 10GB partition containing just OS system files than from the whole 160GB drive. (Not that I would recommend that size for the boot partition, you can get /tmp files that might require more space if you are encoding a large DVD project...) With current fast drives, I'm not sure if that's really even noticeable or not. Depends on the usage, I guess. But potentially you could put the OS system files on one partition and personal /User files on the other partition. There are several options to split up things depending on your needs.
If you need to boot multiple operating systems or versions, it may be helpful/useful to have them on different partitions. (i.e. one for MacOS, one for BootCamp/Windows). Although this might not be required, if one OS gets corrupted, you can still boot from the other one.
Regardless of your partitioning scheme for the internal drive, I tend to agree that it's best to have an external bootable drive that you clone the entire internal disc to on a regular basis as a backup. Drives are cheap compared to recovery expenses when a hard drive fails, which could destroy data on all partitions.
Message was edited by: Glen Doggett

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