I Finally got my new box together and my shiny new Mandriva x64 installed.

I goofed and let the installer install /root on hdc and /home on hdd.

My box seems very stable and fast like this.

Is there an advantage/disadvantage to having these on separate hd's?

Is there a simple explanation why Mandriva uses 2 partitions anyway?

Thanks

An advantage is that if you later decide that you want to install a different distro, you can simply not format the /home partition and you don't loose your personal data. Another advantage is that if the /home partition fills up, the system will still operate because the root partition has data free. A server installation will go even further and have /var on a separate partition. A hacker trick is to try to crash a server by filling up all available space with log entries. Also, if /var and /tmp are on there own partition, you can use the "noexec" mount option which prevents programs from executing on this partitions.

The swap partition on a separate HD can be faster.
If you want more info about partition schemes and theory look for newbie admin guide
and rute guide in lqbookmark