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Can' someone please tell me which is the best method of partitioning a Samsung 1TB SATA-II 7200RPM 32MB rpm SpinPoint F3 HD103SJ Hard disk given that in Windows 7 I need a primary partition between 320-370 Gb for data (movies, music, work files). I heard that I should take into consideration how many platters hard disk has. Is it true? Can someone please help.Could you please tell me what is the best way for partitioning this hard disk? Thank you. I was thinking to do something like this :

/dev/sda1    ntfs             100.00 Mib   boot
/dev/sda2    ntfs             150 Gib      Windows 7
/dev/sda3    ntfs             360 Gib      Windows ( primary - files, work, movies)
/dev/sda4    extended         420 Gib   
/dev/sda5    linux-swap       4   Gib      linux-swap
/dev/sda6    ext4        /    90  Gib      Ubuntu
/dev/sda7    ntfs             320 Gib      Windows ( logical - files)
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    "Which is the best method of partitioning" There is no best method. Whatever suits YOU best is your best method. I have a low sized root and home because I symlink my home to a 2nd disc. Might not be your method but it suits me best.
    – Rinzwind
    Aug 3, 2012 at 10:55
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    Among other things, you do not need to worry about platters as the logical volume manager abstracts these details from you.
    – Sumit Bisht
    Aug 3, 2012 at 10:58
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    This question is overly broad and not answerable in its current form. This is a Q&A website, not a discussion thread. Please use Ubuntu forums.
    – nanofarad
    Aug 3, 2012 at 12:58

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I'd suggest that you keep things as simple as possible. You may have a Windows recovery partition created by the manufacturer, you'll have a Windows ntfs partition, and you will need a partition for an ext4 partition for Ubuntu. A swap partition a couple times as big as your main memory isn't a bad idea.

The more partitions you have the more likely one will be too small and you will have to resize later, needing to do the work of backing everything up before you do--that's why I suggest you only have the minimum number needed and use the large disk size to be rather generous with their sizes.

One commom approach is to add another directory for /home so that you can do a fresh install of a new Ubuntu version after release without having to move your data.

Don't create four primary partitions--four primary partitions don't allow you to add any logical partitions and there can only be four primary partitons. If you want four partitions make the fourth a logical partition in an extended partition. It's a big pain to convert a primary partition to an logical partition.

Bigger disks give you more flexibility. Other than that the particular hard drive you have probably doesn't matter much in terms of partitioning (exceptions would include RAID arrays or other special storage used in large servers).

Many years ago files were placed near each other manually and one cared about cylinder sizes, etc. That's not current practice. The firmware in the hard drive hides the actual disk geometry from the rest of the system, writes these days are simply to the sector number n. The firmware will even move data around as sectors go bad.

As I recall the EXT file systems will try to co-locate the files in a particular directory in the same cluster, to try to reduce disk arm movement. With current disk technology there's quite a bit of data per actual cylinder. Also with current memory sizes modern kernels do aggressive data caching to reduce subsequent I/O to nearby data in open files, removing motivation for worrying about file placement.

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