@spivonious: There are few to no advantages; plus the one advantage - organisation: isn't very often true these days as having two or more drives in your system is fairly common.
I haven't partitioned my drives in over ten years. I just have a dedicated physical drive for the OS/user context. These days that drive is an SSD and then I shove all of my "long term storage" data on to a 2 TB HDD which is rarely spinning.
I can see, to a point, the advantage of doing it on a laptop where you WILL have only one drive - but what I typically do is backup my laptop's drive often and therefore am able to safely wipe out the whole drive without batting an eyelid.
