I know how to partition and all, I just want some help on what sizes I should use. Right now I have one 80 gig and two 160 gigs. I have the 80 in 3 seperate partitions. One for Windows (4.88 gigs), one for apps (10.9 gb), and the third for dl'ing (58.6 gigs). Then I have one 160 gig partitioned into two at 74.5 gigs each. And the other 160 gig as one gigantic partition at 149 gigs. So yah, I wasn't sure if the hd loses efficiency at that big of a partition or not. I would partition the gigantic one into two, but then I'll have 7 partitions. Which might be a little annoying... So any insight or tips would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Personally I wouldn't make a partition that big. Years ago you really ran into some performace issues with large partitions on FAT/FAT32 file systems but thats not as much of an issue these days with NTFS and faster drives. It still will slow it down a little since the drive's file allocation table will be larger and take longer to read through when you want to find or open a file. Mainly it is other issues I would be more concerned with. It will take a lot longer to defragment when the drive gets fragmented. Some of the disk repair tools might not work properly on a partition of that size. I think I remember reading that scan disk has trouble with large partitions since it is still a 16 bit program and can't address blocks past 65535 on a hard drive.