The venerable master boot record (MBR) partitioning scheme can’t fully handle disks larger than 2TB. With 1TB-hard disks now common and 2TB-disks becoming available, forward-looking individuals are thinking about alternatives to the MBR partitioning scheme. The heir apparent is the GUID Partition Table (GPT). Learn how to make sure your Linux system is fully prepared for the future of disk storage.
The only place that a partition table is needed is on the boot drive. RAID data drives are very happy without partitions of any sort! It works great in Linux, at any rate.
Partition-like functionality can be had by using LVM2 on the unpartitioned block devices. Some system scripts may need patching in order to realize there’s no LVM partition identifier to scan for.
Linux is really designed to use partitioned block devices. For example, software RAID autodetection is based on searching for partitions with a particular identifier. Also, boot disks such as knoppix or backtrack will use partitions for automatically identifying and mounting filesystems. Partitioning only uses a few kilobytes of disk space, in my opinion you lose more than you gain by not using partitions.
isn’t this an issue with windows too?
I think that Windows Dynamic Disk uses this GPT partitioning scheme also.