Indexes??

The idea is that you get a performance boost however in most small to medium installations the extra administrative hassle just isn't worth it.

The theory is that searching an index won't require the same physical disk access that physical access to data will. However, the clustered index is always on the primary table partition.

If you are installing on a RAID array or SAN then your physical files are striped across several different drives anyway.

If you have separate filegroups on separate physical devices then not only do you gain that way but each filegroup gets its own thread from the CPU.

You get more of a performance boost by having your log files in a physically separate device from your data files.