I am building a new system for myself that will be used primarily for video capture, storage and playback (from cable, TV, DVD and camcorder).

It's a P4 3.0Ghz system with a 250GB SATA drive (O/S = XP Pro). It will be the only drive, so I do not plan on running RAID at this time. It will be used both as the system drive and a storage drive for large .avi and .mpg files. I may also store my 15GB mp3 collection on it at some point.

I am seeking some recommendations on how you would partition this drive. In the past, I have always partitioned large drives in order to reduce read/write times and improve head longevity. Is this still a good idea with SATA drives, even with improved spinrates and larger cache?