Partition or not Partition?

[RedBeard]

I've always heard that partitioning a HD will slow the system down. and when I first got into computers I had a couple that were partitioned, and ended up not liking the results, but computers have come along way since then.
A tech friend made the segestion to partition a hd with the first partition to have just enough room for your OS (95,98,2000) then leave the rest for your programs to run from. How do you know what size the partition needs to be?
He said that this would keep windows at its top running speed, and if the system fails, all you have to reformat is the partitioned area of the OS, you don't loose any of your programs, or files, thus saving time in reloading.
I'm about to install a 40gig HD so I'm wondering which way to go? and if I should use a program such as Partition Magic or just let windows 2000 do the partitioning.

[Scuba]

Don't partition.
Correct - computers have gone long way since the time you had to make partisions.
If you want to devide, do it with Direcrories.

[tyremanb]

you would still have to reinstall all of your programs, as the registry and all the dll would be wiped when you formatted the windows partition. the only benifit would be that work is easier to back up.

[Missing Digit]

By breaking a large HD into partitions, you will be saving disk space. Even with using FAT32, formatting a large HD will still make large clusters. Over time you will loose disk space because of it. Now I am not sure about NTFS, as I have never used it. Now, the size of partitions you want to make will depend on your needs. I know I am not a big fan of having 6 drive letters for one drive! I broke up my 60g into three 20g parts. According to Sisoft Sandra, I should have made more, but......... Hope this helps.

[Platypus]

I also like to partition, but not too many - my 30G has a 4G primary partition, the rest one partition for data. As mentioned, even with FAT32, very large partitions will waste space with large clusters, not much problem with today's large data files, but more wasteful with OS and applications which have a habit of creating lots of small files.

I find a small boot partition makes maintenance easier (Scandisk & Defrag), and if I do a system re-install for stability with changed hardware etc, all the data is sitting happily on the extended partition (including the Windows CAB files).

Also if you want to utilise the Fast Load for applications (I never have) I believe it requires 4K clusters.

[Scuba]

I use 4K clusters
but my files are huge.
with BIG files it's really better.
the drive i use with 4K clusters have only data files. normaly 500MB to 40GB

[RedBeard]

Scuba are you talking about just going to the root directory in command promt and doing a md images?