Partitioning SQL Server Tables - Approach

I have a SQL Server (2005) table which has nearly 100+ million rows in it, growing at the rate of 10 million each month.

I want to implement partitioning (by month or year - depending upon requirement).

Question: If we implement partitioning and keep all filegroups on one drive ONLY; will I still see benefits? Usually partitioning means splitting files across multiple fileg开发者_高级运维roups on multiple drives.

Here I only have 1 drive. If I implement partitioning for 100+ million rows, will this help in performance improvement for queries (which fetch the data)?

Please advise.

Regards

You'll make things worse most likely

• you'll create a lot more disk head movement
• you add the partition overhead

What I'd suggest

• add more volumes (SAN, NAS, RAID etc)
• make sure you have plenty of RAM to mitigate poor IO

Which makes me think...

What about backups? You have them? On the same drive? Is that "drive" as in single disk...?