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Could you go into more detail here? I like this idea, but i'm hesitant on "guessing" about the size of /
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Even 10GB is a lot of space for a KDE or XFCE desktop (I don't know which you prefer). I have Debian with both KDE and Gnome and it takes up only 6.5GB. Having some free space is a good idea, though. I also give tmp and var partitions of their own and I have an opt partition to hold my third-party IDES and other software. So what I have in mind would be something like:
disk 1: (swap) tmp var / (opt) home (data)
disk 2: (swap) tmp var / (opt) home (data)
The I/O intensive partitions (swap, tmp, var) come first to boost performance; this is becoming less of a requirement with today's hardware, however. I have 1GB tmp and 3 to 4GB var but if you are uncertain about the size of tmp and var, you can just leave them under /. Making var even bigger makes sense for mail or database servers.
Then comes /. I would suggest 8 to 10 GB, or 15 if it holds tmp and var too. There is no better guide than your current setup. Take a look at your / directory and verify how much space it actually occupies.
An optional separate opt partition to contain third-party software but this may as well be left under /. The only reason I give it a partition of its own is that I have some software in there that takes quite a long time to set up and I don't want to reinstall it every time I upgrade my / partition. Some distributions used opt to install some of their own software (for example Suse used to place KDE under opt) but most modern distributions don't use it at all. As said, Leave under / if uncertain.
Then a home partition to hold your personal data. As I share a lot of data between my operating systems, I tend to leave it under /; it functions just as a container for certain configuration files (firefox, mplayer, bash etc) and the actual data are saved to another partition that is mounted under each of my OSes = minimal risk of one OS screwing up another + maximum accessibility of data. This is the optional data partition placed at the end of each disk. I just created mount points under each OS (media1, media2, etc) to mount each of those data partitions. Having a separate home partition is a good idea when you need to separate your own files from the files in your data partition. I personally wouldn't leave something like, say, invoices in a partition that undergoes frequent deleting.
The advantage of this setup is that you can have two 200GB+ data partitions. If you are using the OS on disk1, you can use disk2 to manage your data; as disk2 fills up, you reboot into your OS on disk2 and you can continue work with a fresh data partition on disk1. OS and data are on different disks = minimal risk of lagging. I know it's twice the work installing but then you do get two systems in one.
Upgrading hardware and OS
