gevisz wrote: > 2016-09-01 9:13 GMT+03:00 Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com>: >> On 01/09/2016 08:04, gevisz wrote: >>> 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. >> it will take about 5 seconds to partition it. >> And a few more to mkfs it. > Just to partition - may be, but I very much doubt > that it will take seconds to create a full-fledged > ext4 file system on these 5TB via USB2 connention. > > Even more: my aquiantance from the Window world > that recomended me this disc scared me that it may > take days... >
Something to think on. You have a 5TB drive. You format the whole thing and let's say it takes 30 seconds. Or, you break it into two 2.5TB partitions and then format those, which take 20 or 25 seconds each. That adds up to 40 to 50 seconds format time. Isn't it faster to format one large partition instead of two? After all, you have to type the command in to format it too which also takes a few seconds, assuming you up arrow and just edit the partition letter. No matter whether you break the drive up into parts or not, you are still formatting 5TBs worth of drive. The only way you can save time is to not format the whole thing. Things break. They always have and always will. Sure you can prepare for that lose but if not careful, you could lose it while you are second, third, forth etc etc etc guessing yourself and what tool you are going to use. I suspect that every file system out there has caused a person to lose data before. I'm sure that every brand and even model of hard drive out there has caused someone to lose data before. When it gets as complex has a hard drive and the tools used on them, it has to break at some point. The best bet, duplicate your files just in case something in the above list goes bad. The only advice I think would be good on this, don't use the same brand and model drive for both main and backup. One could even say not to use the same file system, that way if one goes bad due to bad coding in the kernel, likely the other shouldn't be affected, but even that can't be a for sure thing. I hope you aren't to worried about making a backup now that you can think on how everything fails eventually. ;-) Dale :-) :-)
