Resolved External SSD, Volumes or Folders….?

[MarkC426]

I have an external TB SSD connected to my Mac Studio with data/itunes/scratch disk files.
These are currently setup just as folders on the one drive.

Are there any advantages/disadvantages of setting them up as seperate volumes/partitions rather than folders..?

 

[Bigwaff]

Are there any advantages/disadvantages of setting them up as seperate volumes/partitions rather than folders..?

Nope. If SSD die, everything good-bye.

 

[MarkC426]

Nope. If SSD die, everything good-bye.

Obviously it’s all backed up multiple times….. 😁

I wasn’t sure if performance was affected if I am playing iTunes music while rendering to the scratch folder at the same time. If set as volumes it may handle data differently… 🤔

 

[maflynn]

Nope. If SSD die, everything good-bye.

The same could be said for the internal storage. Just use TM to back up the external drive

 

[MarkC426]

This was not a question about backing up…..

More to do with the files on the drive being used for various different tasks, but just saved into folders.
Previously on my cMP each separate ‘folder’ (data/itunes/scratch) is on a separate physical drive.

I was debating whether splitting the drive into volumes would be a cleaner solution.

 

[Bigwaff]

This was not a question about backing up…..

More to do with the files on the drive being used for various different tasks, but just saved into folders.
Previously on my cMP each separate ‘folder’ (data/itunes/scratch) is on a separate physical drive.

I was debating whether splitting the drive into volumes would be a cleaner solution.

If those physical drives were spinning HD, then there would be some performance advantage to physically separating the data access for those applications across separate drives. For SSD drive, not the case.

 

[Ifti]

It generally comes down to personal preference. There is no other advantage or disadvantage to either folders or volumes. I prefer the former TBH.....

 

[theluggage]

The main advantages of volumes seem to be:

• You can set maximum size quotas
• You can mix Time Machine and regular volumes on external drives
• You can make them case sensitive

So, my external Time Machine drives also have a regular volume for ad-hoc manual backups of things that I exclude from regular Time Machine backups (less important VM images, rendered media files etc. that I don’t need a version history for).

Also, I have a case-sensitive volume in the main drive for web development targeting case-sensitive Linux servers.

Edit: dumb error: corrected "partition"->"volume".