[gosha]

Thank you all, and especially ocicat, you're always very exhaustive.

If you are thinking that one disk can be universally used across multiple architectures & operating systems

In fact, before buying the disk, I was simply thinking of reformatting it to ffs with my macmini ppc and then use it through it, and in case of ms windows access, use samba. Then bsd666fan warned me that if I format it with ppc I will not be able to mount the disk on another architecture, and in case of hardware (macmini) failure, I would be lost, since I don't have another ppc. So the ext2 thing was not to use it with other systems, but just in case not to "lose" my data.

It is not entirely clear why you want to slice & dice a hard drive to such a fine granularity.

I remember reading I think in the faq, that in case you have to use fsck, if you have a huge 1T partition it will take ages, so I was thinking of making smaller partitions and since now I don't have 1T of data, to just use about a quarter of the drive for the moment.

Don't expect to master this topic on the first pass.

I don't, this is why I ask precious advice from all of you.

Now, what would you do in my place? I'll repeat the scenario: I have a mac mini ppc (G4) on which I have installed OpenBSD (now 4.3, but when I'll start using my new disk, I will do a backup of the whole system and do a clean install to 4.5). I have bought this 1T disk (WD My Book Essential, pretty nice) to use it for backup and to put in it all the data from three different disks I have hanging in two computers. I sometimes need to use my windows box, so I will probably need to access this disk with windows. Also, my mac mini is always on and I can access it from outside with ssh, and in my usb thumb I have a ssh directory with putty in it, so that I can access it from windows boxes also. So I will have access from the outside to the big drive this way.
What should I do, trust apple hardware, and simply format it with my mac mini to ffs and use it only through it? What would you do in my place? And also, would you make smaller partitions or simply use one big 1T? Isn't it better to separate partitions I know will be written very often from those that are written to only seldom?