Hello!

For a variety of reasons, I'm switching to using a desktop PC for my primary computer away from my 3-year-old MacBook Pro.

Here is my setup plan and I'd like to confirm that this makes sense:

Boot Drive:
128GB ADATA SP900 SSD
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Non-Game Apps and Battlefield 4
GRUB boot loader

Data Drive:
2TB WD Caviar Black
Partitions:
1.5TB NTFS - Windows User folder and Most games
500GB - XFAT - R/W by Mac, Linux and Windows thanks to FUSE

Linux Disk:
500GB Seagate Momentus XT (4GB Cache)
16GB OS Boot Partition (Debian 7.1 or Ubuntu 13.04)
24GB Swap (I have 16GB Physical RAM, this should cover hibernate RAM copy and a plenty extra)
~460GB /home and everything else

I also have 3 external 2TB drives, one will be for backup, one for Music and one for Video. They are currently OS X Ext Journaled but I'm probably going to make them all XFAT for maximum compatibility across OS's.

Any thoughts as to where this might be better optimized?

Welcome to LQ!

Sounds good, but have you considered LVM; also as you have SSD and HDDs you might want to look at

https://wiki.debian.org/Multi%20HDD/...ition%20Scheme

Interesting ideas, I haven't decided myself yet.

Thank you, Mostlyharmless. Both for the welcome and the excellent resource recommendation.

I'm reading that page now and I'm definitely intrigued. I'm trying to figure out how I might need to adapt it a bit since most of the disks are being allocated to use with Windows (honestly I wouldn't use it all except for the AAA game titles I want to play).

There are definitely a few ideas I can take from that in terms of potentially partitioning the linux drive more to reduce seeking but I confess it is also a little bit on the complex side.

More study needed!

In general, is the Linux disk partitioning scheme indicated sensible? Even a few years ago when I ran linux as a primary desktop I always liked having my home partition as a separate partition from the boot partition because it was so much easier to deal with an OS recovery situation.

Anyway, thank you. I appreciate it.

Ok, I'm creating a test Debian 7.1 install in a VM using VirtualBox right now and used Guided LVM for partitioning and just kept the recommended defaults. Now that I see how automated that is, I think that's a winner for handling my 500GB Seagate drive that will contain my Linux OS.