I disagree that you should partition your hard drive that much. One for Windows (or other OS) should indeed be done so you don't lose everything if you have to format and reinstall.
However, having more than two drives (C and D) is a waste of space and actually might be even harder to manage. What happens when one of your six drives runs out of space? You have to put stuff from that drive to some other, which results in a less organised HD. Not good.
However, if you only have C and D...(C for windows and and perhaps drivers and maybe some antivirus etc..depending on how you want it) and D for everything else. Just make the directories on drive D something like..
D:\Programs
D:\Downloads
D:\Photos
D:\Swap
D:\etc etc
That way you don't have to bother your mind with guessing the amount of space you need for each one.
Of course, I'm not sure how having the swap file on a different drive would help, but if it actually does, you could make one for that.
I respect your opinion. However, you should know that partitioning the drive does not waste any amount of space worth talking about. Windows reserves roughly 8MB per *drive* (not partition) to manage the partitions. That's the equivalent of 5.5 floppy disks. I don't think that's worth worrying about.
The reasons for that many partitions is that not everything is backed up the same way. Nor is everything managed the same way. I'll be more explicit as to how a drive is managed when it is laid out as I proposed.
Partition C - The fallback Windows installation. This one gets backed up once after the system has been properly setup. After that it is rarely backed up. Only when a new antivirus or recovery utility is installed in it, is when this one gets backed up again.
Partition D. This one is important for two reasons. 1. It ensures that your swapfile is not scattered all over the drive which *does* slow down the system. 2. Everything in this partition is disposable, in other words, it *never* has to be backed up.
Partitions E & F (main Windows installation and applicatons/programs installed) are backed up only after new (and important) programs have been installed. I back them up more often than partition C but no more than maybe 4 or 5 times a year.
Partition G - data. This one gets backed up very often - sometimes several times a day (of course that depends on what you do with your computer). Being a programmer, any time I get some difficult code to work, an entire snapshot of the current state of the project gets backed up. I do this partial back up dozens of times a day and a full backup of the project at the end of the day (some days have 48 hours
)
Partition G - Attic. Stuff that is rarely backed up, if ever. It also fulfills the purpose of segregating the slowest area of the drive. "Halving" the capacity of a drive in this way is called "shorting" the drive. This, along with the rest of the partitions is what will keep your system responsive even when all of the partitions are close to being full. The responsiveness of a system running off of a hard drive with only one or two large partitions suffers noticeably as the partitions get filled. I hear people all the time lamenting how their "used to be a screamer" system has gotten to be so slow. Shorting the drive would have helped a great deal to prevent the slowdown.
For the record, I am not trying to convince you or anyone else for that matter. Just trying to help. If you want a system that will remain responsive in the long run, you'll need a partition layout that segregates the data into what's used a lot, what's used little and, what must be accessed quickly from what can be accessed slowly. You'll most likely end up with something close to what I suggested.
You are correct in that I have to "guess" how much space to allocate to each partition but, I'm usually not too far off the mark and if I happened to be, I could simply use one of the many utilities that allows you to resize partitions. This "problem" would be taken care of in about 30 minutes in most cases.
be well
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