smart to create 2 partitions on a macbook?

[techyy]

is it worth to create two partitions one for the system with leopard and one for data on a macbook with 120gb hdd?? any performance or security issues? please share your experiences

[superleccy]

I used to do this sort of thing in my PC days - I'd forever be mucking about with Partition Magic.

For the Mac, however, I wouldn't recommend it. All you'd be doing is making your system more complicated and giving yourself more admin work to do; managing your partition sizes. I don't think you'd see a performance benefit. OS X hard drives don't seem to frag like Windows ones do (but cue several posts now that disagree with me).

SL

[tersono]

Superleccy: OS X handles file defragmentation on the fly, yes - on top of which, *nix is designed to work with a certain level of fragmentation - if you defrag OS X it'll actually get slower.

For the OP - no, I wouldn't recommend partitioning unless you have a very specific reason to do so (such as using BootCamp). I would, however, recommend the purchase of a cheap external USB or Firewire drive for backing up purposes.

[ethernet76]

I would not create a separate partition. Many applications require that they are on the same partition as the OS.

There are also no real benefits. Pagefiles aren't as easy to manage as windows nor are application installations. In Windows it makes sense. For mac it doesn't.

[Consultant]

No need to partition for most users.

Small numbers of users might benefit if you
- Need to run a scratch disk that needs to have zero fragmentation (although more ram will minimize the need for this)
- Have a need to run a file server or in an environment with lots of file changes

[hodgjy]

Partitions were only useful (necessary) back in the days when file systems couldn't use disks bigger than XX mb or XX gb. The solution was to partition it into sizes that the file system could understand. It might have had some speed benefits back in the days of Windows and FAT, but there's absolutely no need to do it today on NTFS and HFS+ systems. It never really had any bonus of security, either, because if the disk platter goes, you'll likely lose all partitions. The best solution for document backup/organization is to use an external drive to backup your internal drive.