I'm getting a new 1TB hard drive this week, and it's been quite a while since I last had to setup a new one. My question is, what is the latest "best practice" for partitioning drives? Should I partition a system drive and make the rest data, make it one big partition, or something else? I'm running WinXP.
I personally do not like partitioning Hard Disk Drives. I'd rather have an OS drive, and a separate storage drive. Once HDD prices fall again, I'd recommend you get another drive for the OS (if you have the $) and use the 1TB to store other stuff. Don't forget about backing up...another external 1TB or bigger to keep just in case any one of your other HDDs fail.
With a 1TB drive used for an OS I always partition it with 200GB or so for the 1st partition that the OS installs to and then a 2nd partition of the rest of the space. That way if you do a Windows reinstall the 2nd partition's data doesnt get touched, just the Windows partition side. Higher sized block sizes can increase speed, at a decrease of IOps. But also if you copy between one drive formatted with a block size of say 64KB and one with the standard 4KB then the copy can go VERY slow and take a long time. So its best to keep all your drives on the same block size. If you already have any drives, then keep it at default. If you will only have this one drive then maybe increase your block allocation size to 64KB. I do not think you can choose block size during a regular Windows install though, you must boot into the recovery part of a Windows install and use Diskpart (for Vista or 7) or Diskpar (for Windows XP) to manually specify your partitions and their formatting, then choose "leave filesystem intact" during the actual Windows install. Diskpart is MUCH easier to use as it uses byte sizes for things, Diskpar uses sectors.