Partition laptop hard drive or use external HD

[JD76]

Ive always used an external HD for all my music, itunes library, etc for djing. I just ordered another Macbook Pro... my friend suggested I partition the new laptop and just keep all the music on there. I use a 300 gig HD and have about 60 gigs left on it (but thats without some overdue spring cleaning)... Would you continue to use the external and leave the 500 gig laptops space alone or would you allocate 300-350 gigs for music on a partition and use the other 150 gigs for apps and production tools.

Right now I have an external for music, another external for production (Ableton, Logic, etc) and sample cds. Tiresome sometimes to always have to be plugged in in order to get some music work done...

[bumtsch]

Keep the external drive as a backup, but store everything on the laptop.

[Rokku]

Keep the external drive as a backup, but store everything on the laptop.

+1

keeping separate partitions really only allows you to reload your OS without worrying about your personal files. Most hard drive failures are the result of a physical failure, not a software failure. So, the idea of keeping them separate in case your computer takes a dump...not really very helpful.

[JD76]

Unless I want to keep my music backups seperate from my laptop backups - so the partition can be backed up to a specific music hard drive, correct? Thats the reason why I'd partition it...

[DJZ]

I can tell you from personal experience do not partition your hardrive! I did exactly what you are doing and lost all of my music because I had a problem now I put all of my music on an external HD and it works great!

[Rokku]

Unless I want to keep my music backups seperate from my laptop backups - so the partition can be backed up to a specific music hard drive, correct? Thats the reason why I'd partition it...

You can back up whatever you want where ever you want. I don't know what your current backup routine is, but I use batch files to run my backup routines that send data to my servers.

[Rokku]

I can tell you from personal experience do not partition your hardrive! I did exactly what you are doing and lost all of my music because I had a problem now I put all of my music on an external HD and it works great!

Unless your hard drive was bad in the first place, partitioning had nothing to do with losing your data.

I partitioned 300 computers last year...300...and not a single one has failed. It's just a piece of hardware and a partition is just a separate logical disk on the physical hardware.

Partitioning is great if you're running multiple OS instances or virtual OS instances. For home users, normally not something worth doing.

[sayyou]

I think you can partition your hard drive.
This is the best choice and most efficient way. You will find that is more comfortable than external hard drive.
Guidelines on how to Partition a hard drive in windows by Creating, Deleting, Formatting and Resizing Partition--introduce you this detail article, you can find the solution through it, and you can find the simple tool--Partition Assistant Home Edition, this is free for use, I promise.