Mind if I ask about this one even if it might be so elementary?

I set up one of my hard disks (a Seagate Barracuda 120GB SATA) to have 2 partitions. Previously I configured it using WinXP's Disk Management to have 2 Primary Partitions. Later when I did some troubleshooting I used Seagate's DiscWizard to do a Zero Fill, then to recreate the 2 partitions. Only this time, DiscWizard set up the first as a Primary Partition and the second as an Extended Partition with 1 Logical Drive.

I'd like to know if there are any significant differences/advantages/disadvantages of using Extended Partitions, other than the fact that Extended Partitions are not bootable and can have an infinite number of Logical Drives. I.e. my main concerns are Reliability (eg how well will it survive a crash or deal with bad sectors) and Peformance (is it faster than a Primary Partition?). Also, this is assuming I'm only using Basic Disks (not Dynamic Disks), they're formatted in NTFS, and none of them will be used as boot disks.

none partition is faster than any other , if they use the same partition table, like NTFS.
its a primary partition so that partition is part of a boot sector so your able to boot from the disk (if im not mistaken, im not the biggest HD arcitect guru around).
bad sectors isnt really a danger to a HD.
if you get bad boot sectors on a HD you only have to fix mbr.
but the real problem is crashes.. if your HD crashes, it doesnt matter if you got 1 primary partition in total, or 1 primary and 7 extended ones. a hd crash takes everything on the drive with it.
the only safe backup is to run regurlary backup.
if you chose to run backup RAID or something its your choice.
i burn all my critcal data to DVD's each week.
and i got a backup server running in a corner.

the corporate lie is that HDs have an eternal lifespan.
but thats not true. since there are moveable parts in a HD, heat degrees the lifespan. which isnt the case with CPU, RAM and such.
since no parts are physically moving on that scale.
ofcourse cpu and ram can be ruined also (which happens alot on world scale), but HD's are really really the pc component that suffers of the risk of beeing ruined.
if im not mistaken its these pc components that goes FUBAR.
in quantity order :
PSU
Motherboard
HD's
.
.

so no matter what youll do your not safe from HD crashes..
backup is the only reliable thing to do.

if your HD crash you can always send it to some HD recovery firm (if you got the cash and the data was really important).
but not even that have a guaranty to restore all data.
run backups!