Generally, the smaller you make the initial, primary partition on a hard drive, the better that volume will perform. ... Access times nearly double and transfer speeds are halved along the inner edge of a 1TB WD Velociraptor drive, as compared with the outer edge; other drives show a similar performance pattern.

Will partitioning hard drive make it faster?

Your primary partition, with Windows installed, would live at the outside of the platter which has the fastest read times. Less important data, like downloads and music, could stay on the inside. Separating data also helps defragmentation, an important part of HDD maintenance, run faster.

Does disk partitioning affect performance?

To directly answer the question, in general no, more partitions will not negatively impact performance. In fact, using one very large partition for everything will be more of a negative impact.