Same rules apply mate. Always good to have a smaller partition at the fastest part of your disc for OS in order to constrain it.
Alternatively, get one with a fusion drive and you will find that the OS naturally migrates towards the SSD aspect of the fusion drive anyway so that the OS maintains its 'snapiness'.
I had never heard of the Fusion Drive until now. Having read several articles about it, I understand the advantages of hanging on until the new units are available (end of this month).
In the meantime I will just sit here and wait for my poor old PC to limp into operation or crash out altogether.
I think the days of partitioning are gone. If you have a drive failure then most likely all the data will go regardless of partitions. I have never worried about that and have always kept my data on a seperate drive.
If you are doing a lot of IO on the Mac hard drive then you will need to do a permissions repair about once a month to keep things speedy.
Brit-007 wrote:
I think the days of partitioning are gone. If you have a drive failure then most likely all the data will go regardless of partitions. I have never worried about that and have always kept my data on a seperate drive.
If you are doing a lot of IO on the Mac hard drive then you will need to do a permissions repair about once a month to keep things speedy.
Eh?
This has nothing to do with drive failure. The point of partitioning from this context is to stop OS sprawl and keep OS and apps on the fastest part of the disc, constrained in a smaller faster environment thats all. It offers no protection against drive failure at all, as you mentioned. Its a performance tweak.
If OP can afford a pure SSD option on an iMac (Max 768GB) then great. However an iMac with a fusion option wont be as expensive and allows him to use his single drive bay for 3TB storage. Remember, you cant get an iMac with more than one disc (officially, without voiding your warranty!).
Therefore the sweetspot for performance per pound lies with a fusion option allowing for dynamic allocation of most used files to flash (i.e. OS and some apps). Its not the same as a hybrid drive though, its an on board flash memory and a spinner spanned as one.
In fact if you have a current Mac running 10.8.2, an SSD and a HDD you can set up a fusion drive via terminal. You wouldnt realistically do this if you had a sizeable SSD that you wanted to manage yourself, Im just saying that its how it works.