Is there any benefit to partition the disk if only one partition is required?

Question

I believe we could use the block device directly to do mkfs or create one partition through parted on linux and mkfs on top of the primary partition. However, I'm not sure if there is any recommendations on these two approaches or there is any trivial caveats on top of it. Any comment or suggestion is appreciated.

For my specific case, I just want to use the disk as data partition by itself and build xfs on that disk volume.

The same on Super User: Uses of single-partition disk configuration. — Kamil Maciorowski, Jun 09 '22 at 20:38
I'd still create a single partition spanning the entire disk not to get confused in the future. Various disk utilities may behave awkwardly, e.g. fdisk -l. — Artem S. Tashkinov, Jun 09 '22 at 21:00
Thanks, I have duped the above question to the suggested one. — lordofire, Jun 10 '22 at 00:06

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 09 '22 at 20:38

There are some downsides to a disk-wide file-system, but personally, I do not regard them as issues.

It is unusual.
Not all operating systems support them.

Side-note: Allegedly, Windows and MacOS support and/or recommend device-wide file-systems on USB thumb-drives. I never read anything regarding internal disks, though. Many environments require a partition table, i.e. UEFI for booting a system off that disk. But that is not what you are going for. In case someone an actual real-world issue, please let me know in the comments.

XFS is not supported by either Win or MacOS, so OS support is not an argument. — Artem S. Tashkinov, Jun 09 '22 at 23:38

Is there any benefit to partition the disk if only one partition is required?

1 Answers1