is there a point to having a lot of partitions on mac?

[Col127]

i've been wondering about this for some time now. i switched over from pcs to mac almost 3.5 years ago, but never thought about this until more recently.

is there apoint to having a lot of partitions in os x? or should i just seperate info in directories instead? i know for pcs, it was good to have partitions to reduce defrag times. and i also know it's good to have a separate partition for your os, in case anything goes wrong. but for data, like music, photos, etc., should you separate by partitions? is there any advantage/disadvantage on this?

i use big drives. one 160 gb and one 200 gb.

 

[cluthz]

Its easier to reinstall the system if you have it on a seperate partition.
Multi booting of the computer often requires seperate partitions.
(I have MacOSX, MacOS9 and Linux on my sawtooth, each on theit seperate partitions)
If you do videoediting (and sound editing) its often nice to have it on a seperate partition (scratch disk) since videoediting tends to fragment the HD severely. Then its easy to reformat the video partition.

I have only one partition on my powerbook and that works just fine.

 

[Col127]

would design work fragment the drive a lot like video editing? why does video editing fragment it?

 

[Mechcozmo]

would design work fragment the drive a lot like video editing? why does video editing fragment it?

Because you can have a 5 GB video clip. If that grows/shrinks you get fragmentation. Heck, I have had 35 GB projects before. That really messes stuff up... things growing and shrinking...
Design work in Photoshop and the like, you only use smaller files (less than 20MB I think...) but you do not have a dozen 1 GB PhotoShop files that are current at once, right? If you do, you might consider a small partition for your work. Otherwise, on a Mac, just leave it be. No need to worry about partitions!

Tell the truth I never made/used/knew about a partition because I only used a Mac... when I started to use Windoze I then had to look up what a partition was!