[Question] To partition or not?

No.
When you install your OS on a freshly formatted HDD, it will get written to the outer sectors on the HDD platters.
Since according to basic laws of physics, the outer area of a disc always spins faster than the inner ones (angular velocity) and HDDs, contrary to ODDs, always spin at a constant RPM, access will be faster there.

The trick is to also have your swapping/paging file on these sectors.
That is no problem when you freshly install, however, if  you do not use a fixed size for the paging file (default Windows setting is NOt fixed!!!), the file can get fragmented once you exceed the current limit as it needs to be increased in size.
As you cannot easily defragment the paging file, you would mostly end up deframenting the rest of your HDD, deleting the page file and have it rebuild.
Now, the PF will most likely get written onto some more inward sectors, resulting in worse performance.
Basically, you gained little if at all, because you got rid of the fragmentation (which will reduce speed).

In that case, using a separate paging partition (such as Linux distros do this) is the preferred method, as you can easily defragment that one, if needed.
However, you have to make sure this partition is created at the very beginning or at least close to that of your HDD.
Also, might be hard to achieve.

Ask the other way round, is it a good one?
That surely depends on your use of the HDD.
I for one do not believe in partitioning and rather use a separate, additional physical HDD than splitting an existing one into different partitions if I need more than one drive.

This definately does improve performance, btw

Also, partitions always lead to having enough space combined on all part., but not enough on each!
:bleh:
That's when you wish you could somehow redistibute the free space, which is possible, but not easily achievable, poses danger to your data and will also inevitably fragment the whole HDD, which you cannot get by defragmenting.

Also, I have already witnessed partitions simply disappear into the void for no reason whatsoever!
While you can recover them, it's certainly easier to recover data from a single partition.

The only "advantage" I see (NB: this is just my personal opinion about them, if you like them, get happy with them, it's just "no, thanks" for me... ) is ordering your stuff, eg. have a partition for music, one for movies, one for pictures, one for work and so on.

However, the same can be achieved with several drives and also has the advantage that in case of a HDD failure you will only lose that one drive as opposed to all partitions...

Actually, I favour the opposite of partitioning - spanning.
That means you take two or more drives and create one single partition on them using all the space combined.
It's just like RAID in a way...
And yes, I know it does not help with the security as mentioned above but it gets you lots of single, coherent space fast

Guess I have answered that already, huh...?

Best is to ask yourself what you want to gain from it.
Then we can tell you whether you can actually achieve that or not

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Oh, I really hope so.
Usually I end up typing way too long post losing track or getting lost in the middle of it, resulting in a more confusing-than-helping contribution by me...

I see.
Do you want to set up separate user accounts on a single OS for all of them or do you want to install one OS on each disc/partition and using a boot menu for each user to select theirs?

The reason I'm asking is because if you work with different user accounts, there ususally is no need to keep user files on separate drives because, if set up properly, each user can only access/execute/change his directory anyway.
It may be more structured to put them on different drives, but not that much.

Another question is how much space each users needs and how much you have to distribute.
Quadruple OS installations certainly won't go easy on that.
You would also have to install apps multiple times; using user profiles and installing them for multiple user use also means less licensing problems when using non-free apps.

A different approach would be to store all user profiles and data on a server and use the shared PC as a sort of thin-client only providing the interface to this data.
The advantage is that if you have another client PC that can be used, multiple users can use the PC at the same time as opposed to be limited to this one machine (even if others were physically available).

This is all the input I can give you so far because I do not clearly know what exact purpose you want apart from multi-user usage.
HTH so far anyway

Coming up next - useful links:
• If you like this project, please support it with your donation!      • Grab your HW info (HWIDs) here!     
• If you are a newbie, be sure to check out the DriverPacks tutorial!     • Here's how to create your own DP!