Well, you'll have to make at least one partition, because that's how the computer recognizes the write area.
As for making more, it doesn't protect the drive. If the drive dies, all the partitions go with it. It also doesn't do much for performance.
A single partition is the easiest to work with - you set up folders to sort your stuff and they are all on one logical drive letter.
Multiple partitions make sense for some things, though. For instance, if you want to install dual-boot to some other operating system (to give Ubuntu a try, for instance), then you'll want multiple partitions. If you are going to set up the drive as a Network Attached Storage device (which requires a specially made enclosure with a network port) then you could set it up to use different partitions for each client computer. (I'm doing this at home this week.)
A common mistake is making two partitions and backing one up to the other. The problem here is that if your drive dies, it takes the backup with it. You should never backup a drive to another spot on the same drive.
Another good reason to partition is if your operating system can't see a single 500MB drive. I'm pretty sure XP can, and I'm almost certain Vista can. Anything older than that, and I'd be less and less sure. I know for a fact, for example, that Windows 95 couldn't see anything near that big. You didn't mention your OS, so it might be an issue. If your OS can't handle a 500MB drive, then consider either making two 250MB partitions or making one partition of maximum size and the other with whatever's left over.
As for adjusting cluster size for media type, the peformance improvement does exist, but you're unlikely to notice it much unless you are a serious power user - which (no offense) I don't think you are since you are asking this question here. Making partitions with various cluster sizes for various file types will be far more complicated that it's worth, and you'll be likely to store multiple types of files on all the partitions anyway. I wouldn't worry about that aspect of things. Later on, if you become a bit of a guru, you might consider re-doing the partitions for this, but odds are that if you do eventually do that it will be more for the geek-bragging rights than the actual performance increase. (Although, geek bragging rights are wonderful to have!)
Another reason to not partition the drive is that your forecast of usage may not jibe with reality. It really sucks to be running out of space on your main partition while your data partition is wide open but some programs refuse to install to it. If it's all one, then you never have a misallocation of space like that.
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