750Gb Hard drive with 622GB free.Best partition?

[Anastie]

Recently purchased a 750GB F1. Cloned all over from previous HDD. I now wonder if I should partition the drive? Is it worth it? If so one extra partition or more?
I have Acronis to do this so should be easy.
Just don't know if its a waste of time or best use of large HDD.
Cheers

[peterb]

Assuming you are using NTFS, any partition over 2Gb is going to use the maximum cluster size of 8 sectors (unless you specifically choose to make it bigger) so sub partitioning into smaller partitions aof (say) 2ooGB isn't going to give any advantage in terms of storage space. It might give advantages in how you store information, in that you might choose to use one partition (and therefore logical drive letter) for mp3 files, another for jpeg files, etc. (But of course you can do that in different folders anyway)

If this disk contains the operating system, then there is an advantage in creating another partition for data - as it means it is easier to back up, and if you need to reload the OS, you can reformat the OS partition and do a clean install with less risk to the data. You can also create a partition for applications, although if you do re-install the OS, you have to re-ins6tall the applications anyway.

[DataMatrix]

Partitions also aid in performance when copying files (e.g. two medium size partitions will transfer files to each other faster than say two folders on a large partition), especially on large RAID arrays.