I have a Macbook Air with 128GB SSD. It's used to be a best practice to put the OS on a separate partition from data.
Does that make any sense? What are the advantages to partitioning an SSD?
MacBook – Are there any advantages to partitioning a SSD on a Mac
macbook propartitionssd
Best Answer
Unless you have two radically different sets of data such as
I personally see very few reasons to partition your 128GB SSD, and a number of reasons to avoid doing so.
One pressing reason to avoid partitioning a "small" drive: partitions "waste" space. I'm not referring to the actual disk overhead lost to store the partition data, but the loss of usability when a larger contiguous chunk of space is broken into two or more smaller storage areas. If your single partition has 80GB of space available, the largest single file can be 80GB in size. If you partition your 128GB drive to split the empty space, each partition would have 40GB of room, thus cutting the largest file you could save in half.
I use this extreme example to make this point: all partitions end us with some storage space that is "too small" to use. Every partition you add multiplies this loss... And your SSD is not large enough to waste space this way.
Speaking of "small" drives, performance tends to degrade as you fill a partition beyond 75% or 85%. Multiple small partitions tend to reach this percentage filled much faster than a single, larger one.
In the early days of hard drives when the OS was effectively still built around floppy drives, there were real upper-end limits to the number of files or size of the logical drive. Partitions not only made sense then, but were mandatory to shoehorn newer and larger technology into existing systems. Today, those reasons are no longer pressing on our minds.
Even with a MacBook Air, there is no speed advantage to limiting the number of files or size of a partition. Caching and indexing on OS X allow you to "find", retrieve and open any file much faster than on platter-based storage.
In most cases there is no problem housing multiple users on a single OS X machine. Each user is sequestered from the others and provides decent inter-user security and confidentiality.
I suggest you look at your thoughts regarding partitions and utilize folders to replicate the storage functionality. Looking at my Mac Pro with a 64GB boot/application/"user" drive and a separate array with 6TB of storage, I have the following breakdown on the 6TB drive:
I treat each top-level folder as if it was a partition unto itself.