Overview of volumes, partitions, drive types

Even searching the Microsoft site and others I have been unable to locate a comprehensive overview of partitioning, drive types, volumes, etc.

I will be setting up a new PC from scratch with 2 physical SATA drives (one of which will be the boot drive) and one EIDE drive through an IDE>SATA converter. I will need multiple partitions/volumes/drive letters. Having done this dozens of times before, I thought I knew all I needed to until I saw how the PC was setup by Dell. It has a 47MB FAT (not FAT32) "EISA Configuration" partition, a large NTFS system partition and a 4GB "unknown partition" and all are configured as primary partitions. Do these additional partitions have something to do with it being a SATA drive?

My current 3-physical-drive (all EIDE) configuration is simple NTFS volumes with dynamic partitions and that is what I expected to do in the new configuration.

I am looking for the best performance of course and I need to set this up quickly and correctly right from the start. Anybody know of a KBase article or other resource that will explain all this?

Thanks

 

Blueberry--
Partitioning
http://www.google.com/search?source...,GGLD:2004-31,GGLD:en&q=partitioning+tutorial
(Another popular radified link is http://partition.radified.com/)

Drive Types
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/d/disk_drive.html
http://www.interfacebus.com/Design_Connector_IDE.html
http://www.google.com/search?source...&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-31,GGLD:en&q=drive+types+

Volumes
?? Depends on what you want specifically

 

There is no difference between IDE and SATA drives in the way they handle partitions. The internals of the drives are the same, only the method of data transfer to the controller on the motherboard is different.

Your Dell partitions are all to do with the auto restore system.
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/index.htm

 

Blueberry--I missed your question about the Dell-installed partitions.
McTavish has answered about the 4GB one. That is PCRestore if you ever want to take the PC back to the state it was in when it left the factory. It seems to me that gets worth less and less as time goes on and you make system changes, so I deleted it. I have backups and System Restore if I need a rollback.
The 47MB FAT partition is the Dell Diagnostic Utility. Supposedly it helps Dell's Tech Support people help you when you ask for a fix to a problem. Never used it.

It ticked me off that Dell would try to take up three of the four permitted Primary partitions. The more I think about it, I think Dell had delivered the PC with another (fourth) Primary partition (perhaps designated as Unallocated), but I cannot remember for what. I merged that with my harddrive's partition, so now I have some freedom to create other primary partitions for my own purposes.

A good primer for partitioning

http://partition.radified.com/