new external drive: partitioning question

hey all,

My OWC Mercury Elite 250GB external hard drive is here finally...woohoo. So the two main things I'm looking to do with it:

1) move my entire (or most) music collection over to it to free up space on my poor little 12" PB that has been pulling double duty recently

2) make a disc image (i suppose) of my hard drive to a) back up my computer and b) probably take this time to just clear off the entire disc and reload what i have after removing so many gigabytes of music.

So my question is, should I partition the external drive for this? If so, what would be a good program to do that with? Disk Utility already with OSX or something else? Where can I find the proper steps to clean off my hard drive and start it out fresh with out losing prefs and stuff? Thanks.

sps

 

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