I just bought a new 1T hard drive to replace the dead one for my desktop. I use it mainly for number crunching, doing higher performance computations that consume lots of memory and CPU, and also read and write disk a lot. I will mainly work in Ubuntu.
So the obvious solution for hard drive partition is just let the whole disk to be a single ext4 partition. But I am also thinking about the pros and cons of other solutions with some size of NTFS partition for two reasons: (1) the disk may have errors because of future intensive disk read and writing, instead of using 1T monolithic partition, should I partition the disk into several smaller partitions, so that I can fix the disk errors within a smaller partition more quickly? (2) I might want to install a windows system to use some software that don't have good counter parts in Ubuntu, say Office, though I can install a virtual machine instead.
What would you suggest to partition the hard drive given my purpose? What are the pros and cons?
Thanks,
Jeff