Partitioning and drive usage

[cirks]

Can someone recommend what the best partition sizing and/or drive usage in the following scenario would be:

Machine : Dell Dimension 8400
Disks : SATA 250Gb + 160Gb
OS - XP Pro
Use - all the normal Office progs plus some video editing.

In old machine I had 3 partitions on the main drive (system ~15%, progs ~25% & data ~60%) and the 2nd drive was used for video editing and some other data storage. Don't know if this is the best use?
The new drives aren't set up as RAID.

[agent006]

I'm in the "one bog drive" camp. I've never seen the point of partitioning really.

[GreenV8S]

Only reason I can see for multiple partitions is multiple OSs, or when the OS can't handle the full size of the drive.

[plivesey]

For a single user desktop machine it's no great shakes either way but a well partitioned system is more efficient and safer.

This becomes really important on multi user machines/servers. Certainly for unix/linux/OSX systems a properly partitioned disk(s) is essential.

[dilbert]

The big advantage of partitioning up, from my point of view, is that as long as you're religious about keeping your data separate, you can re-install the OS cleanly and without fear.

I'd say it's definately worthwhile having a separate partition for executable (OS or applications) and data.

[cirks]

the main reason I've done it in the past is to make the data-backups easier (can just back up a whole 'drive' not specific directories). The separation of the OS from the programs may be overkill. However, isn't it generally recommended to do video editing drives on a (physically) separate drive?

[mcflurry]

In historic times with drives of hundreds of mb it was advantageous (sp) to split drives in order that the cluster size was optimal for your data. Valuable space could be wasted as for example a 4kb cluster may be used to store a 1kb file.

With modern drives of 00's of gb of space it isn't as much of an issue. Modern operating systems also help.