Keep something in mind here. While you can have 255 volumes, you can only have 4 partitions per disk. So, in a lot of cases, you have the following:
1- Utility Partition
2- DOS partition
3- SYS NSS partition (If you took the defaults)
4- Other NSS parition for data.(?)
So in this scenario, even if you have free space, you can't add any more partitions. So it's better to have one large partition, with one pool and then create the multiple volumes within that large NSS pool.
I've had this bite me when clients have chosen not to allocate all the space on the server to the NSS pool at first, and then they try to add a partition later and it won't because they've reached the limit even though there is free space.
Now this only considers 1 drive (or raid device).. Yes if you have other logical drives, external storage, etc, you can get more partitions on those drives. as long as NetWare sees it as a separate device.
Marvin Huffaker, MCNE