Partition : understanding files and file groups
There shouldn't be a performance gain by the third option over the second. When you think about it, it's almost the same as having all your user objects in the PRIMARY filegroup. One performance advantage you can achieve with the second option is to flag the older historical filegroups as read-only once you've confirm no additional data modifications are expected, indexes are rebuilt and statistics updated. Once read-only has been implemented, locking doesn't become an issue when querying data in those filegroups.