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spiritlevel

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 5, 2007
378
60
I have a Thunderbay 4 with 4 x 4TB in Raid 5 (Giving me 12TB external storage).

Since forever I have always partitioned my disks/arrays - so I have a partition for "Work" with all my work related files and projects on it, a partition for "Media" with all music, films and photos etc, a partition for "Audio" with audio projects and samples/presets and a partition for "Video" with video projects and footage.

This strategy has always worked well and it makes backup easy with Carbon Copy Cloner - I just manually clone my 4TB "Video" partition to a 4TB external USB drive etc.

I am currently re-looking at my storage strategy though and wondering if what I am doing is best way...

One problem with partitioning is that some partitions fill up quicker than others and free space is split between the partitions. When a partition is close to filling up you have to come up with a solution to increase size of that partition or the array as a whole, even though there may be plenty of free space on other partitions. If all the partitions were instead directories on a single partition, then the free space would be common and there would be more flexibility in the way in which those directories grew over time.

On the other hand, a single partition is more tricky to back up/restore (have to back up directories rather than disks) and I have read that performance can suffer when the disk is trying to read data off one massive partition...

Also, I have never got into using time-machine and am wondering whether I should. If I just had a single drive I would probably use it but always found it more confusing when dealing with lots of different disks and arrays.

Just yesterday I bought a Synology DS918+ with 3 x 8TB drives as a backup solution (and media streamer) and I am also wondering whether I should be partitioning that or just keep it as one big drive?

I guess I am just wondering what other people do in this situation and what best practise is? - Any help/advice would be most appreciated!

thanks
 
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