I would like to see one of these places you've mentioned that partitioning is a bad idea. Also, what brands of hard drives have you used? After taking three Novell classes and two Windows Server classes, which both heartily encourage partitioning hard drives, I'm fairly confident to say that partitioning is a GOOD IDEA, and has it's benefits over having one large partition.
Here's the drives I've had, which all still work, BTW.
- IBM Deskstar 8gb, partitioned into 2GB partitions, MS-DOS limitation. In use since '98 - in my old dosbox.
- Maxtor 60GB DiamondMax, split into 30 GB partitions. In use since '01 in my machine right now.
- 2 IBM 60GB Deskstars, both split in half, in use since '02 In here too..
- Seagate 160GB Barracuda, SATA, Split four ways, housing OS, Swap, Games, and Archives. In use since '03, in use now.
All purchased brand new, OEM style. I've never bought a retail drive in my life... yet.
Partitioning your drives not only physically separates your data, but allows you to change cluster sizes per partition, enabling you to tweak the drive to your liking. If you have a lot of small files, you'll want smaller clusters, to avoid the amount of slack space taken up by data sitting in a cluster, but not fully filling it up. If you desire larger clusters, you can tweak it to have larger clusters. no problem there, it's just that you have the ability to change it to whatever you want. So yes, it's possible to have a drive with your host partition at 4Kb clusters, and a storage partition with 16Kb clusters. This is more important for serving, or data storage, and the typical computer user really doesn't have to worry about it, unless they're extremely picky. I'm not that picky, and use 4kb clusters for all my partitions.
About the "making the drive work harder" bit. It's true if you're say, defragging all of the partitions at the same time. That's going to cause significant thrashing and you'll be doing more harm than good. If you're copying one large file from say, your C to D partition which reside on the same disk, it's like copying and pasting the data to the same place, just further down the drive. The same exact thing a defragmenter would do. If you have activity on two partitions, say your OS, and a game, you won't see any performance drop, or increase, even on old ATA drives. I've tested this before and found minimal to NO difference performancewise whatsoever.
Partitioning is not a bad idea at all, it's just another way to split your disk up into sections. If partitioning was such a horrible idea, why do so many people run Linux? IIRC, when you install any distro of linux, it's reccomended to have two to three partitions, a system partition, swap, and data partition. Why? because it keeps the data permanently seperated. I even go so far to suggest this for Windows, putting your swapfile onto a seperate partition, to avoid swapfile fragmentation. Beleive me, when your swapfile gets fragmented, you'll see a drop in performance. It's not totally huge, but it's noticable. You'll want to keep a small, say 100mb swap file on the boot partition for crashdumps, but having it seperate ensures that it will never be touched by anything, except Windows itself. That's the same exact reason it's done in Linux. Any Linux users out there who might think I'm totally off base here, feel free to correct me, because I don't use it every day.
So, as far as your drives failing, that's more of how you handle your machine, what you do with your machine, and what kind of hard drives you own. Stick with high-quality well known drives, such as Seagate or Hitachi (IBM) drives. Make sure you partition your drives correctly. It's not stupid to have them, in fact, you might be able to eke out a little more space out of your hard drive if you partition and set cluster sizes accordingly, so it has it's benefits.