3TB Fusion Drive: Best Practice Partitioning For Performance

[Skyjamma]

Howdy.

This is my first iMac. I was wondering if there are any benefits to partitioning the 3TB Fusion drive into 2 or more partitions for performance purposes. I'll be using the iMac mainly for large RAW file photo editing. Have purchased a CalDigit AV Pro 4TB external HDD drive for backup purposes. Would appreciate any suggestions, as I'm not really sure what the best practice approach for a 3TB fusion drive is, from a max performance standpoint, if any in fact, but thought to ask. Thanks.

 

[leman]

If you work with large files and need constant read/write access to those files, the best practice is to put them onto an external disk (USB3 or Thunderbolt) -this way the heavy IO operations won't interfere with your main drive where the OS/caches/software is located, allowing you to get highest possible performance. It does not make much sense to partition your main volume, certainly not from performance standpoint.

 

[dan1eln1el5en]

in old days partitioning was a good idea (bad blocks could be moved somewhere on the drive that wasn't in use)

but the past many years there have been no real need for it with "modern" file systems.

make one big drive.

considering the Fusion drive have a read/write of 3-400 MB/s, at first you won't feel the need to use an external drive (esp. if that connected via USB2 or less)