Advice on HDD partitioning

[abularkin]

I"m thinking of getting another HDD. First, I want to backup my DVDs, second, I might want to use it as a download folder for the newsgroups, third, I'll probably have to copy over another HDD of about 3 GBs.
My questions are...
1) what partitioning sizes should I use for all 3 uses?
2) what brand should I get?

Yep, guess that's all I can think of right now.
If anyone has some other criteria I should look at, all replies welcome.

[q1aqza]

Speed is important, you'll need one that is minimum 7200 rpm and ATA100. My personal preference is the IBM Deskstar range.

It depends on what size harddisk yopu are buying but as a minimum I would suggest an NTFS partition of 20 Gb for your DVD back ups and the rest partition up as you need. A good partitioning guide can be found on http://partition.radified.com/ .

An example, my second HD is 60GB and I have 3 partitions on it:

Partition 1.
30Gb NTFS for DVD back-ups and Video Editing/ Capture. Make this the first partition as it is on the outer disk and can be read faster, hence better for Video capture and DVD Backup involving lots of disk writing.

Partition 2.
15Gb FAT32 partition for storing Ghost images of my three OS partitions from HD 1, plus various other data back-ups, email inbox etc. (Also archived on DVD ROM).

Partition 3.
15Gb FAT32 partition for storing all my Digital Camera photos, CD Music, MPEGs awaiting DVD authoring, etc.

[freak_in_cage_10k]

yeah man, q1aqza knows what he is talking about, but Maxtor also make good hard drives if IBM are not avaliable m8