Partition Advice - 640 GB

[drakleon84]

I'm about to build a new system with a WD 640gb Black and I had a question about how I should partition my drive. In the past I've usually always had a fast small drive (used to be single raptor, then 2 raid-0'd ones, before that an ancient seagate barracuda) and a larger storage drive for keeping moves/programs/raw digi phots/zip'd games, etc.

However, now I'm moving to a world of having only 1 big drive (well, I also have a 500 GB External 'My Book' I use for storage on my most recent system). Should I...

A. Don't fragment the partition. Just install Windows and use one big drive and act like nothing is going on, and continue using the My Book as storge?

B. Partition about 150 GB towards OS/installed programs and any games I'm currently playing, partition the rest as storage and keep music/movie files I want access to on that 400GBish partition? What kind of access speed issues will result in accessing files that aren't on the partition the OS is on? Any?

C. Please volunteer a better option, as I'm sure there is

My PC use normally consists of gaming, some casual web design, MS Office docs for work. The bulk of my stored files are music (around 80GB) I use in iTunes nearly everytime I'm on the computer, gaming or otherwise, and digital photos. Which I normally keep the RAW or super large jpeg files on a storage drive (like my My Book) and keep my favorites/photo album of compressed/cropped/smaller pictures on my OS drive which accounts for a few GB (the raw photo files closer to 30-40GB, which I hardly use, more or less as a backup/record of originals).

Thanks for advice and solutions

 

[Paperdoc]

This is opinion, not gospel, because I don't have a system like yours. Personally, I prefer to use one large volume. From what I read around here, there is little benefit in performance / timing in partitioning into two volumes as you suggest.

HOWEVER there are a lot of people who partition just as you say, but for a different reason. If ever your C: drive gets fouled up and you have to reformat and re-install Windows on it, it sure is nice to have all your data files safely stored on another drive that has no problems; that includes this model where the "other drive" is a logical disk located on the same physical device. As far as Windows is concerned it really is separate, and re-doing everything on the C: drive (first partition) does nothing at all to the D: drive (second partition).