Partitioning Your Hard Drive

A very common question from Mac users is asking why anyone would partition a hard drive. The answers are varied and given for many different reasons, but there are some positive reasons to partition the hard drive for a Mac.

One good reason to partition your hard drive is to help you organize your files. The more you use your computer and the more files you accumulate and store on your hard drive, organization can get a little crazy. You can partition the system software and the data and although it may not be perfectly neat, at least the same type files will be in one partition.

Partitioning your Mac will help the Spotlight feature run faster. Huge amounts of files are stored on your computer and Spotlight must run through all of them to find your query. When you partition the hard drive, Spotlight is able to find what you are asking for in less than a second.

Mechanical failure to your system can make a system stop working. Sometimes when this happens, the only way to repair the damage is to completely delete the hard drive data and restore the system. All the data stored on the hard drive will be lost, unless you have partitioned the data and separated the system. When you know where the problem is located you can erase only the damaged portion and restore that piece of data without harming the rest of the data.

Backup systems are a lifesaver and when stored on a separate partition of the hard drive it make life easier for two reasons. One, it is easier to switch to an older running system in the event an application is not compatible with a newer installed system. Two, keeping your backup system on its own partition means that if the boot system fails, you can reboot in the backup system and hopefully use the Utility application to restore the boot system.