Should I partition my storage / server volume?
 

My ubuntu server has two drives, the second one being used purely as a storage drive accessible via samba, etc. I'm about to upgrade it from 150GB to 500GB, and go from ext3 to xfs. Is there nay reason to break it into two (or more) partitions, for performance or whatever? The drive has about 40-50GB of mp3's (say 5MB each) and 50-60GB of photographs (>5MB each) and a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. Now that it's bigger, it will also be used for backup from several laptops. If it makes sense, I could make one partition for the backups, and another for the media and misc.

Any advice?

For performance

The items you access most often will be slightly advantageous if stored towards beginning/center of the drive, backups that are not accessed often can be allocated high/end of the drive. In my experiences with multiple partitions, the smaller and the closer to the beginning will help performance, the larger and further towards the end are slightly slower. One large 500GB drive will have allot of format/directory information to go through in order to find what it is looking for, smaller partitions have allot less format/directory info to go through before figuring out where it is stored.

This is not based on shear knowledge, but based on experience.