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. 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 ? :-) > > 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 -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
