On External HDDs and Partitions

While I am a staunch advocate of HD partitioning, I have not yet done this on portable external hard drives. I just want to know if this will be a wise move and if you guys would automatically do this.

Anyway, I just bought my 3rd portable HDD, which I plan to "share" between two laptops. The capacity is 500gb and I plan to do a 50/50 split. Now, to add specifics, I would also like to know:

1. If an external drive will be more efficient or perform faster in terms of reading if it is partitioned into two, as opposed to a single partition with two primary folders (each containing multiple folders containing muliple files).

2. If a partitioned external hard drive does more work? And as such, would it have more read/write errors (taking into account that it only draws power from either 1 or 2 USB ports, etc). Also, if this would (although I don't believe it would) give recognition problems (i.e only one drive is recognized instead of 2)?

3. Finally, this might be a silly question, since they share one piece of hardware, but suppose one partition gets corrupted, would the data in the other one be intact (or, at the very least, recoverable)? Or this will just follow the same principle as internal HDDs?




So ... one Partition with organized filing or two partitions with organized filing ...

Will this be worth the trouble or be more trouble than it is worth?

Thanks!

 

The badvantage of 2 partitions is formatting one, leaving the other, for example after your MTF becomes to large... (NTFS only)

Performancewise your HDD is possible limited by the USB port - thus I wouldn't expect any performance increases.

 

1. No, not when used through USB as USB won't even reach the limit of the HDD's max bandwidth. If used via eSATA or as an internal HDD that'll be true.

2. No, not really.
2b. No, it should not give you any errors at all.
2c. If a harddrive is partitioned into 2, it'll still be recognized as one harddrive, as it's only one harddrive but with 2 partitions on it.
It'll be exactly the same as an internal, just that you have it connected via USB and it's limited by USB bandwidth.

3. If a harddrive gets broken, it doesn't matter how many partitions you have, the harddrive should be considered as one, no matter what.
If you mean corrupted as in that the filesystem will colapse on one partition, then yes, the other one will be intact. But that's nothing hard to recover from as it is not a major damage.

An external HDD is exactly like an internal HDD, but just connected via USB.


But i don't understand what your usage is when you say it's gonna be used on 2 notebooks. You cannot have one external harddrive connected to them both at the same time making both notebooks use that harddrive at the same time, if that's what you're looking to do.