I just bought my first external hard drive, a 46 GB FireWire unit. I have no experience on this matter and would like to know if partitioning the drive would be better than leaving it as is.

.....I heard somewhere that VirtualPC runs better in a partition....Does anyone know if this is true?

depending on what you use the HD for...I don't really see it being a need to partition an external HD...

As for VPC, it runs better on a dedicated, bootable partition, and I don't think the FW drive is bootable...I have been proven wrong many times before however...

As long as you format HFS+, there's no big advantage to partitioning unless you're also running other OSes like OSX or Linux. VPC doesn't count since it runs inside MacOS. The advantages of booting off a dedicated VPC partition are very minimal - it's all covered in Connectix's Knowledge Base. I use VPC every day and saw *maybe* a 5% performance increase when I had it in it's own partition. Compared to the trouble of having to reboot every time I want to use it, it's not worth it.

With the advent of FireWire 2.4 (and 2.5 just came out) FireWire drives are now bootable.