[yvonnars]

I don't know if I want to partition because I'm just a noobie Mac user but I did just get my MBPr not long ago.
Reasons I want to partition my external hard drive are:
1. I want to use a portion to store stuff for PC as for my school work as most of them have to be done on Windows,
2. I want to use part of the hard drive for time machine to backup my Mac, 3. I want a part of the hard drive to store files that I read/write using a mac. That way instead of 3 hard drives I can just use one. But please let me know if there's an easier way to do that without partition.

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Please share a reason that a user would want to partition a drive. I understand that many years ago, this was necessary to properly use a drives capacity, but I fail to understand any worthy reason to do it with today's drives and operating systems. Partitioning a drive in my experience and that of many users I know, is that the partitioned drive will result in a partitions that were improperly guessed as to the size that they should be. ie. A user would think that they needed 50% for documents and 50% for an iTunes library but would later find that their guess was wrong and they now had a full partition on one half and a barely filled partition on the other half. How is partitioning any better than merely creating folders for each division of documents or files and allowing the OS to provide the space as necessary within each folder that the user creates?