I bought a MacBook the other day and maybe it's just that I'm not used to not having to mess around with an OS after install but I thought that at least I should partition the drive to have the system files and apps on one partition and all documents, media files etc. on another. That was what I used to do with Windows all the time and it helped when I had to reinstall the OS. I have read a good deal of forum discussions on the topic and so far it ends up as a question of preference. Some say that with OS X the system works best with the default setup and recommend to just keep the internal harddisk as it is (no partition) and use an external drive for backup. The thing is that you can't easily alter the system's links to point to another location of the User folder different to the one defined by the OS, i.e. on another Volume (well, you can, using developer's tools and so on). Which makes me think that I'd better leave it as it is and have everything work as intended. Why fix what's not broken and make things more complicated than necessary? Or maybe not? Any recommendations? I don't intend to install other OS on the drive by the way. What kind of setups do other Mac users have? It's not really a big issue, just wanted to get some feedback.
Due to the way that OSX sets out it's files, I see no reason to partition your drive. Everything is quite neat and tidy without slicing and dicing. I keep mine all together. However on Windows, you end up with mess everywhere, so I'd recommend partitioning. The only occasion I would fiddle around with the size of my partitions on OSX is either that I was installing a second OS, or that I had a second hard drive which I'd share up as a /Users folder.
I agree with Mooseblaster. I'd only partition if you're planning on running Bootcamp and Windows. Just a little heads up about that, I partitioned my black MacBook to run XP then restored it to make it one volume again and now it won't let me partition it again because it says that it needs to be one volume even though it says it is one volume. It's weird. So if you're gonna do that, I'd make sure you'd want to partition for good, just in case.
Thanks for the replies. Actually I had it partitioned once and then undid it - no problem at all. I'll keep it this way now.
