How large should I make the system drive (on 500gb HDD)

On my current computer (XP), I have a 500gb HDD, and have two partitions. 30gb for the system drive and 470gb for files. I have ran out of room on my 30gb system drive and I dont even store any files (music, pics, docs, videos, ect) on it.

I'm currently building a computer to do a fresh install of Windows 7 when it comes out. I will be using one new internal 500gb HDD.

What are your suggestions for partition size? Because 30gb is way too small.

It would be nice to actually put my music in the "my music folder", and my pictures in the "my pictures folder", instead of storing them on a separate partition.

Can I use all 500gb as the system drive? If I can, is that a bad idea?

The advantages of having more then one drive is the ability to create images of the entire drive and storing them on something other then the OS host drive itself. When creating an images of the 500gb host drive here that run about 95-98gb in size is stored on one of the two 1tb drives used for storage and backups.

Despite everything trying small OS primaries and large second partitions 30gb is quite a bit too small as you found out there. Once you start adding new programs and creating new files as well as downloading updates along with other things that space is simply consumed too fast!

The minimum recommendation for the OS Host/Boot primary is generally good around 100gb in size upto let's say 150gb. The remaining space for light to average use can be set aside for storage and backup for a single drive system.

With the addon usb drive you can easily assign regular scheduled backups there or on a good sized second partition on the host using the external as the main storage device. The second partition on the host can also be smaller for images only running between 200-300gb leaving the other 165gb for the main OS. 500gb size = 465gb usable drive space

When first going to see how well the Windows Easy Transfer worked in 7 I simply set up a test install on a spare drive and restored the backup made from the present host install on the external installed internal in no time.

That even saw the wallpapers assigned with the DisplayFusion program appear right after beginning the restoration process as well as the remaining files and folders. Channel 9 at MSDN goes into that in a video short labeled The Complete Guide to Windows Easy Transfer seen at The Complete Guide to Windows Easy Transfer | NicFill | Channel 9

GParted live can even copy entire partitions in order to avoid data loss but still will take a bit of time for that.

It actually depends on how much you plan to be running. When the 7 beta builds were first available I first attemped the 40gb start off and ended up being too confined in order to load on just about anything and everything to see what would run.

Subsequenntly I ended up shrinking the XP/Vista dual boot primaries on the same pair of drives down to expand the two 7s out to 100gb there.

Once the RCs were available it was time to run full speed on 7 seeing large single primaries with XP being removed and Vista on the VPC! The 32bit RC ended up replacing Vista on the same vhd which was set to expandable.

The difference here of course is simply having 5 sata drives installed two being 1tb in size! I have quite a bit more drive space to work with. But even with a 465 single primary for the host install here I'm now down to about 65gb of free space left! It never hurts to allow some extra space.