hard-drive partition question

i got a new hard drive and now when getting it prepped it's asking me if i want an extended or primary partition.
this is my back-up drive, so no OS is on it.
what's the right/better choice here?
i wanna break it up into 3 partitions 75-80-80 (since i have around 235gigs from 250 drive) thanks

 

In the old days it would always have been one primary partition and the rest would be extended.

Of course ntfs doesn't care about that anymore, and as long as you have 4 or less partitions there is no reason not to make them all primary partitions. If you are still using the fat32 file system you'll want the first one to be primary (it doesn't actually matter which, just whatever the first one you make happens to be) and the rest to be extended.

 

If you want all your drive letters to line up properly and automatically, make it all an Extended Partition. You can then create as many Logical Drives within that Extended Partition as you want/need. You do lose a little space that way as an extended partition can't start on track0-cylinder0, but not enough to worry about.
. If you make a Primary Partition AND you have an Extended Partition on your primary hard drive, then the drive letters in your current extended partition will be shifted up one letter. You can change that manually in storage manager, but that is a PITA so why bother...

.bh.