How bad is partitioning?

So, I've been trying for a while to figure out a way to back up all the data from several smaller firewire drives onto one larger backup drive. My goal is to be able to create a different volumes on the backup drive... then copy the contents of each of the smaller drives onto a volume of the same name on the larger drive. So if I had an external drive A and external drive B, I could just copy them to external drive C which has been partitioned with the names "external drive A" and external drive B". My theory is that I wouldn't have to reconnect all the media on each of the projects I use. Now, I know partitioning is not recommended for performance... but if performance wasn't a big issue, would my media still be safe on a partitioned drive, or am I just asking for drive failure problems?

Dan

Why not just create three folders on the backup drive?


www.derekmok.com

That's what I have been doing, the problem being that there tend to be MANY subfolders. So even though I chose to reconnect all the other files in the file path, it tends to take a long time because I have many file paths.

Dan

P.S. This is why I use as few subfolders as possible when working on my own projects.

I can think of one problem. You can't change your mind about partitioning later. Once you partitiion, you're pretty much stuck until you format the drive and start over. There are software packages that claim to change formatting on the fly, but they are dangerous.

Koz

The long and short of partitioning history is how much space does it actually take to store a 4K sized document? It used to take 16K on a hard drive under HFS formatting. Since Apple HFS+ formatting does away with minimum file sizes problems, partitioning is pointless.

I see, that is a good point, but I dont' think that'll be an issue since this is for archive purposes. Does partitioning effect the performance?