2016-09-01 9:13 GMT+03:00 Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com>: > On 01/09/2016 08:04, gevisz wrote: >> I have bought an external 5TB Western Digital hard drive >> that I am going to use mainly for backing up some files >> in my home directory and carrying a very big files, for >> example a virtual machine image file, from one computer >> to another. This hard drive is preformatted with NTFS. >> Now, I am going to format it with ext4 which probably >> will take a lot of time taking into account that it is >> going to be done via USB connection. So, before formatting >> this hard drive I would like to know if it is still >> advisable to partition big hard drives into smaller >> logical ones. > > it will take about 5 seconds to partition it. > And a few more to mkfs it.
Just to partition - may be, but I very much doubt that it will take seconds to create a full-fledged ext4 file system on these 5TB via USB2 connention. Even more: my aquiantance from the Window world that recomended me this disc scared me that it may take days... > Are you sure you aren't thinking of mkfs with ext2 > (which did take hours for a drive that size? > >> >> For about 20 last years, following an advice of my older >> colleague, I always partitioned all my hard drives into >> the smaller logical ones and do very well know all >> disadvantages of doing so. :) > > So you are following 20 year-old advice for hardware relevant to 20 > years ago and not taking tech advances into account ? :-) Yes. But, please, take into account that after these 20 years I decided to reconsider the old "rule of thumb." :) >> But what are disadvantages of not partitioning a big >> hard drive into smaller logical ones? > > You only get 1 mount point > Some ancient software might whinge and complain about not having a > partition table present. > The drive vendor no longer has a place to put their magic sekrit > phone-home data collection stuff. Oh wait, that's a benefit and belongs > below > >> >> Is it still advisable to partition a big hard drive >> into smaller logical ones and why? > > The only reason to partition a drive is to get 2 or more > smaller ones that differ somehow (size, inode ratio, mount options, etc) > > Go with no partition table by all means, but if you one day find you > need one, you will have to copy all your data off, repartition, and copy > your data back. If you are certain that will not happen (eg you will > rather buy a second drive) then by all means dispense with partitions. > > They are after all nothing more than a Microsoft invention from the 80s > so people could install UCSD Pascal next to MS-DOS I definitely will not need more than one mount point for this hard drive but I do remember some arguments that partitioning a large hard drive into smaller logical ones gives me more safety in case a file system suddenly will get corrupted because in this case I will loose my data only on one of the logical partitions and not on the whole drive. Is this argument still valid nowadays?
