One big partition or a few smaller ones?

I have 80GB (yes I know that's pathetic nowadays), should I divide it into three drives or one large drive?

Depends on what kind of file system it'll have on it, what you plan to do with it, etc. Me personally I'd leave it as is. If you feel you must truly partition it, make two 40 GB partitions.

Different filesystems cope better with different sizes of files.  Lots of little files or a few big files?