Simon,

> :-) Ive seen so many servers setup like this, I'm not sure of the
> reason but I would hazard it has some reference to DOS not
> supporting large drives on single partition .

Sort of. As a former network support (Novell, Nt, *nix) from long time
ago I can answer that one. :-) We were always teached to leave a
partition for the operating system alone (for temp files, not swap and
new apps/services) so if a rogue app consumed all the free space, it
wouldn't kill the server's space. And for security reasons also, not
letting anyone even near the sys partition.

> As for swap file, I read somewhere that these should be placed on
> their own unpartitioned drive, disk I/O access for memory swapping
> is then seperated from other disk I/O / OS functions in much the
> same way as a dedicated drive offers better performance for
> databases.

Yes, absolutely. Preferably on another interface (scsi or whatever) so
the I/O used by swap doesn't interfere with the data flow.

HTH
Andrew