Optimising an external USB drive for Time Machine?

[l2oBiN]

I am purchasing an external usb powered passport drive for Time Machine backups. How do I optimise drive to keep up the performance as I have noticed once the drive is full its performance drops dramaticaly.

 

[sammich]

All storage devices will slow down when they are full. If it's your time machine volume, you probably won't notice it since you don't access it very often. That said, if you want to save space, you can limit what gets backed up in the Time Machine Preferences. Or you can buy a larger drive.

 

[l2oBiN]

All storage devices will slow down when they are full. If it's your time machine volume, you probably won't notice it since you don't access it very often. That said, if you want to save space, you can limit what gets backed up in the Time Machine Preferences. Or you can buy a larger drive.

I have heard somewhere that maybe partitioning the drive to keep one section clean hence it would never totally fill the drive up would improve the performace. Is that true? if so how much should I partition?

 

[BlueRevolution]

No it's not. What matters is what percentage of the partition is used, not what percentage of the drive.

Time Machine is designed to deal with a full drive. Just set it up and forget it.