[andrewas]

I woudnt bother with partitioning. It can help you keep things organised, work on one and games on the other and so forth, but there are nor real speed advantages. It used to be that partitions had a maximum size depending on filesystem, but FAT32 supports up to 2 terabytes so thats not a problem anymore. NTFS has no limit that I know of.

The only partitioning I would recommend is a 5gig for the OS, since that way you can safely reformat your OS partition without destroying data and saves, although youll still need to re-install programmes. (You could back up the relevant parts of the registry, but in most cases its registry problems that force the re-install).

On cluster size. The principle is simple - the HDD is in clusters, each file take up a whole number of clusters. Therefore a 1 byte file takes up one cluster, which means that programmes with loads of small files waste a large proportion of their space. The larger the partition, the more space wasted.

But on an 80Gb drive I woudnt worry about a difference that is only about 100Mb maximum.