I heard some discussion at filemaker devcon about running filemaker server 10 on a dedicated machine with the drive partitioned by 3. One partition for the operating system, one for the database folder and one for backups. Anyone have an opinion on whether this would be a good idea and will it work?

It would work, but would be a nuisance to set up and I can't see any particular benefit. If the drive hardware failed you'd probably lose all three partitions at once.

I'm curious, though: why was that setup recommended?

James

It is a good idea, and it works well. A better approach is to use three separate physical drives with the same division of labor.

Steven

I use this approach in the Windows environment.

It is good for:

1) organization

2) minimizing file system fragmentation (IMHO)

As Steven mentions, separate physical drives would be better. Even more so if you are dealing with a lot of users hitting the databases real hard. That is where the mechanics of the physical drives begin to make a big difference in performance.