Particle system implementation

Hello all. I''m about to start working on the particle system of my 3d engine. I have a question of implementation though. the way i was going to implement it was to had a 1x1 square in a Vertex buffer, and hold all the translation,texture and scaling information in the structure that describes the Particle . that way i save memory by not creating more vertex buffers. however you want to make a 3d engine as fast as possible, so i was wondering how other people do it. thanks in advance.