Best way to partition a new disk

[pipspeak]

I've read many opinions on how best to partition a hard drive to get the best performance in over the long term but is there a definitive answer?

I curently have my hard drive partioned roughly 50/50, with one half used for WinXp and all major apps, and the other partition reserved exclusively for documents (since they change a lot and because it makes backing up to an external drive a lot easier).

I've read, however, that putting WinXP (and MS Office perhaps) in their own 5GB partition, then all other apps in another partition, will improve performance. But will it? If so, by how much? And where would semi-system folders like "Documents and Settings" have to be?

Also wondering if then having a third partition for non-app documents would be advisable or not. Not forgetting that there'll also be a fourth partition -- the hidden IBM recovery partition. Is there a downside to having too many partitions (in this case on a 60GB drive)?

Any advice or links appreciated.

[Vindicated]

Partitioning a single hard drive won't give you any performance benifits. All it does is give you an area to put your documents and downloads when you need to format and reinstall XP.

What your thinking of doing only applies if you have multiple hard drives (not partitions). It allows each drive to access different files at the same time. This mostly applies to desktops - and if you going to have a desktop with two hard drives, might as well go for a Raid0 setup.

[whizkid]

Vidicated is absolutely right. (Vindicated again!) There will be no performance improvement. Well, not usually.

The only possible performance enhancement I can think of is if you have a partition that is dedicated to swap, so the swap file would never get fragmented. That is not usually a problem though, and the benefit would be very small. More RAM would easily have much more impact on performance.

There are other reasons, though. One you've found is to make backups easier. Another is to help keep things in their own place. Another is to have multiple operating systems.

Me? I have one big 30GB partition for XP and backup over a network onto a 250GB drive, and 10GB for Linux.