Then, for what it's worth, I suggest you partition your hard drive.
Split it down further too.
Then again the last statement made tends to suggest otherwise (it isn't theory either) so unless you are sure your friend is right, I suggest you not partition and allow the NTFS system to function, with the proper free space, MFT and without forcing the head to seek. As for the details, there is a latency factor being applied by placing a partition table(s) into a mechanical hard drive.
It matters not. What ever works for you, thats fine
Buffering using mechanical or limited bandwidth solid state bus means only goes so far and in a high performance system, is useless. There is a cache to buffer spec for all mechanical drives which means the drive can never exceed that spec for I/O. The only buffer that 'theoretically' adds to performance would be a solid state buffer that is not restricted by a USB (30-40MBs) or older PCI bus systems. In that Robson Technology by Intel is being developed for PCIe bandwidth which will allow solid state buffering of data. It uses the Vista Ready-Boot and Ready-drive systems and it also has its limits which are related to motherboard bus technology, in other words, you are better off on 4 gigs of high speed system memory than using Robson Technology or Ready-boost in Vista and trying to run 1-2gigs of PM.
The best HDD system is solid state whereby partitioning and mechanical latency have absolutely no influence on file reads. The second best is a dedicated RAID, SCSI or SATA card which has a dedicate DDR2 RAM memory onboard to cache with the system RAM and communicate at only the limits placed on it by the card slot. In that 64bit PCIe or PCIx increases that ability by quite a lot, however, it all comes down to the bottleneck a mechanical drive places on a system to begin with. Memory fills up and that drive has to be paged regardless of the buffer in place, therefore, it is best to purchase a drive with the highest 'Buffer to Disk" rating possible and the lowest access specs and not slow it down further by forcing more mechanical activity.
Many people think because a WD Raptor is a SATA 150 drive, their SATA 300 is faster, on the contrary, the buffer to disk spec for a WD 150 Raptor is 80MB/s and a SATA 300 sits at about 56-65MB/s max. That, and the fact the Raptor has a 10,000 RPM platter with lower access specs, makes it much, much faster.
To partition such performance setups is, quite frankly, rediculous
