Partitioning my new 1TB drive

[Marc Shapiro <marcnshap@gmail.com>]

Now that I have my Seagate 1TB drive functional and recognized by Linux, 
I need to format the thing.  As I mentioned in my previous thread, my 
current boot drive on this box is only 40 GB.  I intend to keep it as 
the boot drive and use the new drive primarily for extra storage.  Since 
I don't do regular backups (I already know what you will say about that) 
I am also wondering what I might be able to do, now that I have space, 
for a little added security in that matter.  Perhaps I could just copy 
the 40GB boot drive to a backup directory tree and keep it updated with 
rsync, or some such?  Any ideas on that?

My main question, however, was partitioning the 1TB drive.  I have never 
had this much space to deal with.  While it may be technically possible 
to simply make one big partition, I am guessing that it is probably not 
a practical way to do it (and I will want several different partitions, 
anyway).  If I am using ext3 partitions with neither vast numbers of 
tiny files, nor small numbers of monstrously large files, what is a 
reasonable maximum size for a partition that will be easy on the file 
system and the drive, itself?

--
Marc