Question: Are there any special hardware wise advantages of partitioning a hard drive before OS installation compared to doing it after OS installation?
(Here by advantages, I mean physical effects like lifetime of the hard drive etc., not that losing data or , being unable to shrink etc.)
Answer: No real advantages.
If you only have one drive you do not even get a choice. You have to have something to install the OS to, and for windows that is a partition.
(For completeness sake: For almost any OS that will be a partition, though you could tell BSds etc to use the raw drive in dangerously dedicated mode. And I would not be surprised if QNX, GNU/Linux etc also supported this).
Having said that: