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I have a 2TB USB drive plugged into CentOS 5.5 that will be formatted with ext3 and will only be used for file-level backups.

I've always partitioned my drives but a while ago when I had setup Amazon EBS the docs said to just format the whole device (eg. mkfs /dev/sdf instead of /dev/sdf1) and ext3 would warn you but allow you to do so, which it did.

As I understand it, partitioning in this case will only be necessary if I want to boot from the USB drive which will not be happening and I really want to save those 512 bytes.

Skip or keep the single partition? Why?

Thanks

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up vote 5 down vote accepted

Use a partition. One day, somebody needs a USB drive fast, take one from a box and think it is empty because there is not even a partition created and all your data is lost.. There will always be an OS which cannot handle filesystems without partitions on hard drives

Even if the chance of this is small, the price is even smaller ;)

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