panamahat:
If it were my drive I'd repartition it into several smaller partitions, to mount at various parts of your system, and leave a large part unpartitioned for future use.
My 1 TB external drive has a number of partitions with various Linux OS, and others for data storage; a total of 17 partitions. The largest is 322 GB and is dedicated to videos, and mounted on /movies2. My fstab is below to show other mount points.
# Entry for /dev/sda8 :
LABEL=kde2011 / ext4 defaults,noatime 1 1
LABEL=TR5-Documents /home/polack/Documents ext3 rw,user,noauto,exec,noatime 0 0
LABEL=Documents2 /home/polack/Documents2 ext3 rw,user,noauto,exec,noatime 0 0
# LABEL=share7 /share7 ext3 rw,user,noauto,exec,noatime 0 0
LABEL=share1 /share1 ext4 rw,user,noauto,exec,noatime 0 0
LABEL=share9 /share9 ext3 rw,user,auto,exec,noatime 0 0
LABEL=movies /movies ext3 rw,user,auto,exec,noatime 0 0
LABEL=movies2 /movies2 ext3 rw,user,auto,exec,noatime 0 0
# LABEL=TV-1 /tv ext3 rw,user,noauto,exec,noatime 0 0
LABEL=storage00 /zstorage00 ext3 rw,user,noauto,exec,noatime 0 0
LABEL=120backup /zbackup ext3 rw,user,noauto,exec,noatime 0 0
LABEL=boot200 /mnt/boot ext3 rw,user,noauto,exec,noatime 0 0
#LABEL=part17 /mnt/17 ext4 rw,user,noauto,exec,noatime 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sda2 :
#LABEL=swap200 swap swap defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sda2 :
#LABEL=swap300 swap swap defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sdc2 :
LABEL=swap1000 swap swap defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sde2 :
LABEL=swap750 swap swap defaults 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto rw,user,noauto,exec 0 0
/dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom auto ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/sr1 /mnt/dvd auto ro,user,noauto 0 0
# none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
By breaking the drive into many smaller partitions it's easier to organize, and if a filesystem on one partition becomes corrupted, it can be unmounted and fscked, or even reformatted without losing everything on the whole drive. The larger the drive the better it is to have numerous partitions. Leaving part of the drive unpartitioned gives you the flexibility to create partitions as needed and of an appropriate size for its intended use.
