Any point to multiple partitions?

[antasari]

If I have a single physical drive, is there any real advantage (to either performance or security) in having more than one partition on it? Browsing around, I find most people seem to recommend separating applications and data, but the motivation seems to be little more than using multiple partitions as glorified folders. Am I being too simplistic? If I need to reinstall Windows or defragment or whatever, do extra partitions really help? Is there any advantage in having a FAT32 partition on the drive? etc

A second question -- if I have a second physical drive, do the answers change? For instance, I'm told that you should then move the page file to its own partition on the second drive, not that I really know what that means ...

(Why I'm asking: my computer's been pranged, and I suspect it's a virus or a hardware problem with my (single) HDD. I'm replacing my drive with a new one, hence the first question. If that works, I'll try adding the old hard drive and clearing it of malware, hence the second question.)

 

[rpstewart]

The main reason for partitioning a drive is to separate data from the operating system and therefore it is possible to reformat the c: partition during a reinstall without affecting the data on the d: drive. This means a) you don't need to restore from backups and b) you can have all the necessary drivers for the reinstall to hand.

Performance wise there is a minor benefit because if you create the OS partition at the start of the disk it therefore sits on the fastest part of the HDD.

 

[Had3s]

I'd suggest having a significantly smaller partition for the OS, and the second large one for data, and even possibly a third for the swapfile. On a 300GB drive, I generally limit my OS to around 50Gb, and once a month ghost it to the data drive. If my OS ever gets corrupt, then I can simply have a working, configured OS reinstalled in about 10 minutes.
I learned this from wasting too much of my life performing clean installs on one single-partitioned drive.