Partition or Not?

[cjp3212006]

I am building a new system and wanted to get some opinions on Partitioning a hard drive.
Here is my system:

CASE: COOLERMASTER CM 690 II ADVANCED
MOTHERBOARD: EVGA P55 SLI
CPU: INTEL I5 750 W/ STOCK FAN
MEMORY: 4GB OF G SKILL DDR3 1600MHZ CL9
HARD DRIVE: 1TB SAMSUNG SPINPOINT F3
GPU: EVGA GEFORCE GTS 450 SUPERCLOCKED
PSU: COOLERMASTER SILENT PRO 600W
CD/DVD: SAMSUNG CD/DVD BURNER
OS: WINDOWS XP

Are there any benefits to partitioning a single drive?
Should i put my OS on its own partition?
Using partitions for Organization on HD?
Partitioning now and then setting up RAID 1 later?

Thanks

 

[treefrog07]

Are there any benefits to partitioning a single drive? Yes. Having the OS on one primary partition and My Documents on another primary partition protects your folders and files if the OS dies. But not if the HDD dies. Perform routine backups.

Should i put my OS on its own partition? I do that.
Using partitions for Organization on HD? Yes, see above
Partitioning now and then setting up RAID 1 later? Probably not, you need at least two HDDs for RAID.

Thanks

see above

 

[cjp3212006]

Best answer selected by CJP3212006.