So, that would make you 124?

Hahahahahahaha.
Happy holidays.

Do not partition a spinning hard drive unless you are simply using it as folder respository for archiving.It is true that partitioning a hard drive doesn't provide the same performance advantages that you get by using two physically different drives.

However, I always partition my main boot drive, and doing so has saved me hundreds of hours of grief over the years. Therefore, I highly recommend the practice.

Why is this a good idea? One word: backup.

If you partition your main drive into the C: partition, and then allocate most of the rest of the space to some other partition and drive letter, you can do an image backup of Windows and all your programs (which is all you keep on the C: drive) and do it in a matter of minutes. Even after almost four years, my main editing computer has only about 12 GB on the C: drive, and I can back it up to an external disk drive in less then five minutes. If something bad happens (for me, that usually involves installing some program that screws up my computer), I simply attach the drive with the backup, run a restore, and I'm back to where I was in less than ten minutes.

I never worry about a disk failure, because replacing a hard drive and restoring the programs and operating system takes only a few minutes.

If instead I kept everything (programs, O/S, and data/video) on one partition, an image backup would take all day, and a restore would take even longer. Yes, I could reduce the backup time by using incremental or differential backups, but these make the restore operation far more complicated.

You can, of course, get this same advantage by simply not using all the space on your C: drive, or by using a really small, but very fast drive for your boot drive (like an SSD). However, the most brilliant software engineers I've ever met once observed that an empty hard drive is useless. OK, that's obvious. However, he then posited the inverse, namely that the most useful hard drive is one that is almost full. Thus, keeping a hard drive empty means you are wasting potential. Therefore, partitioning so you can still use all the space, but without burdening your backups, is a great idea.

In the olden days of spinning hard drives and minimum footprint OS - you could justify segmenting a drive into a small partition with the idea that you were putting boot partition into a confinement. But several things have changed. OS has achieved far larger footprint in its native state and ever reaching size with registration into the registry of patches, apps, etc. Then how the hard drive is used has changed beginning with OS like Windows NT and has been on a track ever since expanding into OS like OS Windows 8.1.

Now the confinement issue makes less sense. It should be said that a spinning hard drive reaches optimum usage when there is just slightly more than 20% free space factored. So you do not want to fill a hard drive. Appears then that a modern OS should be right-sized on boot drives that are probably in the region of 250 GB up to 500 GB. Maybe you want to partition a spinning 1 TB drive chosen for boot drive installs into smaller segments?

I would have to agree that partitioning a SSD really doesn't do anything that creating two folders on the drive wouldn't do. But some people like it for organization purposes, drive sharing, etc..

As for not editing on the boot drive. It's good practice with traditional spinners but since SSD have 100 times the random read speed of spinners there are really no worries with OS overhead being a problem.

I'll leave this thread with one last comment. With SSDs being priced at around $400 for a TB drive, for me, except for archive storage of video and movies it's SSDs all the way.

I have a 64GB Plextor SSD C drive, it's about 2/3 full and has been that way for the past year.. Runs fast, no issues, it's automatically incrementally backed up every two days with Macrium at 1am.

I have several other drives in the box for all the miscellaneous stuff people accumulate over the years. In addition I have one drive caddy in the front of the box, so I can swap out any number of drives for archive storage of video projects. Putting everything on just a single big SSD is fine, but then I can't do the swap thing.

Just recently bought a bare drive dock. But the idea of handling a bare hard drive with an exposed PCB just seems wrong, and nowadays I note that NewEgg will sell a 1TB 2.5" external USB3 drive for $70. So I guess that's the way I'll go in the future--no more need for a drive slot in the front of the PC.

I no longer have the budget for that Samsung SSD you mentioned, and now not so sure that's the way I would go. I went with the WD Black 7500rpm model and used the rest of my budget on BCC 9 upgrade, the Red Giant Software sale today, and other bells and whistles. Now my system is set up like this...

C: 750 gig SSD (OS/Boot drive)
D: the new WD 2 TB Black 7500 rpm (editing projects drive)
E: WD 4 TB Black 7500rpm (render-to/storage drive)
M: WD 4 TB Black 7500 rpm (2TB partition archives)
N: same as M: (2 TB partition archives)