Partition sizes on 120 GB drive?

[aloevlund]

Hello all.

I recently bought a MacBook with a 120 GB hard drive, and I am currently waiting for my UTD Leopard. I plan to do a clean erase and install. If I want to partition my drive, so I have one for the system and installed programs, and one for my data, how big should the system partition be? It needs to contain Leopard, iLife, Microsoft Office '08 (when it comes out) and additional updates.

Does anybody have any advice?


Thanks.

-Anders

 

[marclapierre13]

I partitioned my windows xp hd to be 26 GB. That way after installing XP I have about 20 GB left.

The only thing I plan on doing with my XP is putting games on it. And any other programs that arent compatible with OSX.

I have some other games running on OSX and most of my professional software, CS3, aperture, iworks.

 

[Nugget]

I suggest not partitioning the drive at all. There's really not much benefit to doing it, and it's almost certainly going to cause awkward problems down the road when one of the two fills up and you wish you'd chosen different sizes.

 

[marclapierre13]

I suggest not partitioning the drive at all. There's really not much benefit to doing it, and it's almost certainly going to cause awkward problems down the road when one of the two fills up and you wish you'd chosen different sizes.

Er...you're kidding right?
Partitioning is how you run 2 OS's. Thats how you get the most out of your MBP

 

[benlee]

Hello all.

I recently bought a MacBook with a 120 GB hard drive, and I am currently waiting for my UTD Leopard. I plan to do a clean erase and install. If I want to partition my drive, so I have one for the system and installed programs, and one for my data, how big should the system partition be? It needs to contain Leopard, iLife, Microsoft Office '08 (when it comes out) and additional updates.

Does anybody have any advice?


Thanks.

-Anders

Anders,

As the above poster suggested, partitioning would serve no benefit to you. Partitioning is mainly for having different startup drives.
You should just stay with one partition and keep programs and data on that.

Why would you want them on separate partitions?

 

[S2NINJA]

I can see some benefits to partitioning a drive even if you're not going to be running multiple OS(es).

For instance, by having your system on a separate partition, in the possible event of system corruption, or major OS problems, you can freely format and reinstall the system drive without fear of losing all your data files.

That said: I have to agree with everyone else. Other than that, there's no real other advantage. And 120GB isn't very much space to begin with. If the above is the reason why, then you're better off just getting a backup external drive and using something like superduper to backup your entire drive....

 

[twombles62]

What about boot camp then?

 

[Nugget]

Er...you're kidding right?
Partitioning is how you run 2 OS's. Thats how you get the most out of your MBP

Yes, partitioning is necessary if you want to run multiple operating systems, but that's totally irrelevant to this discussion. aloevlund intends to create two HFS+ partitions both for use within OS X. I think this is needless and will lead to eventual frustration for no tangible benefit.

I'd also disagre that you have to run multiple operating systems on your computer in order to get the "most" out of it, whatever that's supposed to mean. Unless there's a specific Windows application you need to run, Boot Camp is hardly a necessity. Millions upon millions of Mac OS X users survive just fine without ever putting Windows on their computers.

 

[aloevlund]

Why would you want them on separate partitions?

I don't do this on my current iBook, but a friend of mine said that I should, in case i would need to reinstall in case of corruption or some junk like that. I've had no complaint with just one big partition (60 GB on my iBook). I did it on my old PC running XP, but I just wanted to see if it would be a good idea.
But I don't think I'll do it, because I don't plan on running two operating systems on my MacBook.


-Anders

 

[dcorban]

People who suggest partitioning "just in case" have simply spent years living in fear of Windows and the FAT file system.

As for "making it easy" to reformat, it is still easy. Keep all of your music, documents, videos, etc are in one location (the user folder). Backing up your data is as easy as drag and drop to a network or portable drive.