I know having a hdd for wxp alone is good but..

is it the performance if i partition a HDD and apply wxp alone to a small partition? I just purchased a 200GB 7200rpm SATA drive and will be reformatting. Does having the partition for wxp alone have the same effects of having a hdd alone for wxp or should i just put everything inside the 200GB unpartitioned?

 

Having Windows one one partition, and programs & possibly a swap file on a separate partition(s), on the same drive minimized fragmentation of Windows some, since a lot of the drive activity goes on outside Windows' environment, but doesn't speed things up any, since the same read/write heads have to find & transfer the data for everything being done, just like when everything is running from the C drive partition. It may actually slow things down some, as the heads have to cross the dead space between partitions to go from Windows to the various partitions, which will be further in on the drive, where data transfer is a little slower. Having programs, and particularly having the swap file, on a second physical drive can speed things up since you now have two different sets of read/write heads searching for and transferring data somewhat simultaneously.

With 200 gigabytes, it's a good idea to split it up just for management purposes. If you assign different partitions for different functions, it can be easier to find where things are, and you don't have to do one massive defrag of the entire drive all at once. I keep Windows & programs on C & D, and use E & F for storage. IF C crashes hard, I haven't lost the stored data on the other partitions, and I can defrag partitions without running programs on them while doing other things, like nosing around here.

 

Also, make the first partition the small, windows one. This partition will be at the end (fastest) part of the hdd; so, all windows files will always be on the fastest part of the drive.
This should give a speed boost as time passes and more crap is put on the computer