I’ll say right up front that I’m not a huge fan of partitioning a hard drive. With today’s prices, it makes sense in many situations to simply buy another hard drive instead of creating partitions. Some experts say that partitioning can waste space and even decrease your hard drive’s performance. However, there are some situations when it might still make sense to split up your hard disk, such as the following:
- To use Boot Camp :: If you use Boot Camp Assistant (built into OS X 10.5 Leopard and later) to run Windows on your Mac, it creates a special partition just for your Windows installation. Unfortunately, Boot Camp Assistant won’t work if your disk is already partitioned, so if you intend to use Boot Camp, you’ll have to stick to just two partitions (one each for Windows and OS X).
- To switch between versions of OS X :: If your Mac is capable of running multiple versions of OS X (for example, you have an early Intel-based iMac that can run Tiger, Leopard, or Snow Leopard), you can partition your drive so that you can use more than one. Divide your disk into one partition for each version of OS X, and then install the operating systems separately. When you need to run a different version of the operating system—say, for testing, or to use older software that won’t run under a newer OS—open the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences, select the partition you want, and click on Restart.
- To repair disk problems :: If your startup volume develops disk errors, you may need to run a repair program (such as Disk Utility) from another volume in order to fix them. That other volume could be an external hard drive or a bootable DVD. But another option is to keep a small partition on your main disk that includes a bootable copy of OS X and a repair utility or two. When trouble strikes, you can boot up from this volume and fix some problems without having any secondary media at all.
- To share your iPhoto library :: If you want to share a single iPhoto library between two or more user accounts on the same Mac, one way to do so, per Apple’s advice, is to move it to a volume where ownership is ignored. That can’t be your main startup volume, but it could be an external disk—or another partition of your internal disk.
- To manage backups efficiently :: I recommend maintaining two kinds of backups. The first is bootable duplicates of your entire disk, using a program such as Bombich Software’s Carbon Copy Cloner (donation requested) or Shirt Pocket Software’s $28 SuperDuper!. The second is versioned backups (which store copies of your files as they appeared at many points in time) using Apple’s built-in Time Machine or any of numerous other backup utilities. You don’t need to keep two different hard drives around for your two types of backup. Instead, use partitions. For example, if you have a 1TB internal disk, you could buy a single 2TB external drive, divide it into two 1TB partitions, and then put your bootable duplicate on one while using the other for versioned backups.
Source: "Five Reasons to Partition a Disk" by Joe Kissell, published at Macworld.com.
I tend to stay away from partitioning drives. But some of the reasons mentioned above require it. However, I urge caution when partitioning a drive so that you can have two types of backup on one drive. Many people like to partition a large drive so they can run a clone backup and a Time Machine backup on the same drive. Unless you have another backup somewhere else, you’re putting all your backups at risk of drive failure.
Granted, the odds of your backup and your primary drive going at the same time are rare. But in the case of a power surge, flood, fire, theft, etc you could easily loose your Mac and all the drives connected to it. With all things you must do a risk/convenience/cost analysis. But especially when you have partitioned your backup drive, I strongly encourage some other backup system (preferably offsite) for mission critical files.