If I have a disk (whether a physical disk or a virtual disk managed by a some VM hypervisor) that I want to use as a single big partition, do I need to actually create a partition table with one big partition, or can I just create the filesystem on the raw disk? I.e. instead of partitioning /dev/sdg into one big /dev/sdg1 partition, can I just do mkfs /dev/sdg to create the filesystem on the entire disk and then mount it with mount /dev/sdg /mount-point?I tried it and it seems to work, but is there any reason not to do it if I know that I'm never going to want more than one partition on the disk?
Can I use a disk without partitioning it?
filesystems;partition