I have bought an external 5TB Western Digital hard drive that I am going to use mainly for backing up some files in my home directory and carrying a very big files, for example a virtual machine image file, from one computer to another. This hard drive is preformatted with NTFS. Now, I am going to format it with ext4 which probably will take a lot of time taking into account that it is going to be done via USB connection. So, before formatting this hard drive I would like to know if it is still advisable to partition big hard drives into smaller logical ones.
For about 20 last years, following an advice of my older colleague, I always partitioned all my hard drives into the smaller logical ones and do very well know all disadvantages of doing so. :) But what are disadvantages of not partitioning a big hard drive into smaller logical ones? Is it still advisable to partition a big hard drive into smaller logical ones and why?
