Partitioning my external hdd and a few other questions?

Im going to partition my hard drive to install windows vista. I will be using vista solely for gaming, nothing else.

I will have at least half life orange box, crysis, far cry, unreal tournament 2007, command and conquer and maybe a few others.

1. My question is, including the installation of vista, how much should i partition off for windows and my games, would 50 gigs be sufficient? i really only want to partition as little as possible, only partitioning the amount i will need and a few gigs spare. I will have all the games installed ready to play on it at any time, and a bit of spare space for any other games i would want to install.

2. Could i partition vista onto my internal hard drive and put all my games on my external hdd and play them fine? Will they run just as good as an internal drive or should i keep it all internal.

3. After i have installed vista and done the partition, can i re-partition changing the amount of space and still keep all my files untouched.

P.S

I have found these two external hard drives.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/128603

or
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000EXZB02/

Im tempted with the western digital one, but there are very mixed reviews. Some people say its fab and others have complained of it breaking and numerous faults.

4. Now, it is really important that i will be able to partition my external hard drive, this is a must!!!!!! I was going to buy a cheap Lacie hard drive and then found out there is no possible way to partition it.

4a. can i partition any of the two above?

5. And my final question, When i have my hard drive and when i use bootcamp to go to vista, will windows be able to access files when it was formatted through mac OS?

I know its along post and i really appreciate any help given.
Thanks!!!!!

1. We wouldn't have a clue as to whether 50Gb is enough or not when you give a list of games and say "and maybe a few others". Suggest you give 10GB to the Win install, then add the space requirements for all the games you're going to install to come up with a number that you feel would be adequate.

2. Rephrase - Can Vista be installed via Bootcamp and then when installing applications in Vista choose an external drive to install them to? - Yes
Will they run just as well? Depends - and since we don't have a clue what computer you have - am assuming you have a Mac at least - If your internal drive is a 5400 rpm drive and you're using a USB external, probably not. An internal 5400 rpm drive connecting via firewire, probably about the same. If you have a 7200rpm drive and connecting via USB or FW, the load times will be slower. The actual play experience should be the same.

3. Any time you re-partition a drive, all info is lost on the drive in question.
Is there an app that will allow you to dynamically change the size of multiple partitions when working with an HFS partition and a FAT32 or NTFS partition on the same drive? Am not aware of any at this time.

52 ratings with 41 giving it 5 stars and 48 giving it 4 or better - that's 92% - and 87% out of 155 on the 250GB version at newegg rate it 4 or better - typically anything over 80-85% is extremely good with any piece of technology - would hardly call that mixed reviews - there will be units that fail - don't care whose brand name is on the package

4. Who says a Lacie drive can't be partitioned - while I personally would not buy a Lacie drive - until someone proves it to me, that's a bunch of malarky

4a. Have never heard of a drive that could not be partitioned with the appropriate partitioning software.

5.??????? I assume you mean that after you have partitioned and formatted the external drive from Disk Utitlity provided by OS X, when you boot into Vista on your Mac, will Vista be able to read the external drive?

If you format the drive as HFS, windows will not be able to read the drive without the purchase of MacDrive.
If you format one of the partitions on the external as FAT32 or NTFS from within windows, than yes, it would be able to read that partition.

Thanks for your help.

Just to clear up, i have the latest 20 inch model imac, So the internal hard drive will be 7200 RPM. I will be getting the Western Digital 500GB my Book.

I will install vista onto my internal hard drive, and all the games for it onto my external drive and run it that way so it should be fine. The reason for this is because i will use my internal hard drive solely for Logic Studio 8, and i don't want anything else on there to clutter it up etc. The external hard drive will be for all my media.

As for Lacie, well i read in a review that It was not possible to partition that hard drive. I suppose it is likely that he was just an incompetent fool.

When i partition my external hard drive i will have it half vista half Mac OSX. But, say for example i am in Mac OSx, will it be able to recognize that half the drive is dedicated to vista. Would i be able to move files whilst in mac OS to the windows portion of the hard drive? I hope that makes sense.

Thanks for your help!

OS X can read and write to FAT32 (or Dos)
OS X can read NTFS partitions
OS X can write to NTFS partitions with Paragon's NTFS for Mac
Windows can read and write to FAT32 and NTFS
Windows can neither read nor write to OS X's HFS formats without MacDrive