I have a MacBook Pro m1 with 2tb SSD internal

I don’t want external drives

Should I just plonk my DAW projects and my sample libraries in folders on my desktop?

Or should I create a partition for Big Sur and apps (say 250GB) and another partition (say 1.75 TB) for samples and projects? Or even discrete partitions for both samples and projects?

I would think this a good way to go in terms of cloning backups, and possibly let’s the OS ‘think’ more clearly by having its own partition, versus getting its brain scrambled by having to manage OS duties, plus sample reading & daw audio streaming

The OS won't care. The SSD won't care. Backups can be configured as required. Configure in whatever way you find most convenient.

Definitely NO. Put everything on the same partition.

For my own curiosity could you explain the technical reasons why you should avoid partitions.

The last audio pc I build was 10 years ago and a lot of best practices seem to have changed and I'm trying to update my knowledge.

The traditional benefits of partitioning were to reduce fragmentation and keep the oft-accessed system files at the disk positions that are the quickest to access (ie. near the edge of the platters). These benefits don't apply to SSDs.

I'd only recommend partitioning if you plan to maintain a whole-disk image of the OS for quick system setup/recovery, or run multiple OS'es. Otherwise it's just a nuisance.

I'm on the PC side, not that it really matters as your question pertains to recording with 2 TB SSDs in general. I went with three partitions; that said, I don't think it makes much difference as you've already received replies from people who are perfectly happy with 3 partitions, 2 partitions, and none. The overall conclusion is you can record perfectly well with one 2 TB SSD any way you slice it (or don't). There is no "best" way. It's just personal preference.

I'm really sorry I haven't seen your reply before. The reason is not much technical, but more of a convenience. Basically: don't overcomplicate if you really don't need or have a special reason for it. Performance wise, the difference would be negligible. Having extra partitions become a problem when one of the partitions gets full. Then the hassle to backup, recreate (or resize?) the partitions, just to postpone the problem for some more months/years, is not worth it, in my opinion.

There is no need to partition a SSD.

Partitioning drives is something that was wise to do when hard drives were magnetic with moving parts. They were prone to wear out. Today's SSD's have no moving parts.

This is why I still have a relatively small (1 TB) C: partition on Windows. I don't need my ~2 TB of music related stuff and ~2 TB of games to be included in the daily image backup. Even if the backups are incremental, having a lot of unnecessary data slows down the backup process and causes the initial backup image to become larger.

What? The OS? macOS is already on its own partition and you don't even know for some reason. I have no idea what you mean with the rest of your reasoning.

If you have to ask, then there is no reason whatsoever to partition. Well, you can learn about it all of course, but wouldn't you rather make music?

I do partition now and then and I also know why.

This is all largely irrelevant for Mac users.

This is not a reason to not [create APFS-volumes] on Macs. APFS solves it. Disks get full, [APFS-volumes] do not as macOS shares space dynamically. [While volumes aren't partitions, they are the better option and can be used in the same way really.]

**Edit**Terminology updated with brackets. See later posts by zephonic and Ben Jenssen for details.

The approach I adopted for was to keep all samples under one folder and likewise for all projects, presets, impulse responses and of course plug-ins (most of us have that by OS design). I also have DAW-specific folders and files in one single place.

The idea being to not spread things out so that I, and more importantly my DAW, can always know where to look/search.

For flexibility reasons some stuff could be put on an external, for usage elsewhere, but an internal partition? That's just futile.

Instead of partitioning, MacOS let’s you create volumes, which are logical only, not physical.

I have everything on my internal SSD, but created a separate volume for my music/audio projects. Volume size is elastic, so the OS can allocate more to one or the other as needed.

My VI libraries are all on MacHD (or C: drive in Windows speak).
I think with current SSD speeds, there is little point in keeping everything separate.

OP's question was about a modern mac with a modern version of macOS, therefore we're talking about an internal SSD formatted w/APFS filesystem.

On a modern mac, this means that you would most often not partition, but create new "volumes", which is a feature unique to APFS that lets you create "virtual drives" that behaves much like partitions, with one important difference - APFS volumes 'shares' the free disk space. So volumes doesn't have to be set up with a fixed size, like partitions do.

You can still create partitions on a mac drive, but you really should have a very good reason to do so. Example; I have a portable drive with two partitions, one with APFS and one with ExFAT, for moving between macs and PCs.

Don't worry about partitioning if you don't have a very good reason to so. Should the need arise, you can create or delete volumes quickly, at any time.

But you must have a backup of your internal, anyway.

Thanks to Ben Jenssen and zephonic for using the proper word Volumes (APFS). That I use these as I'd use partitions doesn't make them that.