Daniel Prince wrote:
What is the best way to partition a 2tb hard drive for Windows 7 64
bit? I am thinking of a small "C" drive for Windows and programs
and a big "D" for all my data. Another possibility is a small "C"
drive for Windows. A medium sized "D" for my programs and a big "E"
for all my data.

Which do you think is better? What size do you think I should make
each logical drive? Thank you in advance for all replies.

Depending on what backup strategies you've got, you might let
that affect how you partition. If it wasn't for that, you could do
a single big partition.

I keep my C: relatively small (40GB right now), and it doesn't
really affect my backup method. I continue to use the "System Image"
capability built into Windows 7, which effectively only backs up
the "used" space on the partition. So if I made C: 2TB in size say,
the System Image function would still only be doing a roughly
26GB copy (the amount of space actually used currently).

But, if I ever needed to copy C: verbatim for some reason, it's a
40GB copy operation.

I'm not encouraging 40GB as the "right size". To make that possible,
I turned off System Restore. The "right size" would be a partition
larger than that. For most people, they'd find the space restrictions
annoying with that size choice. But that size does allow sector by
sector backups to be done more quickly (if, say, the NTFS file system
was damaged, and I needed to transport the partition somewhere).

My "data" partition doesn't have too much on it right now, but that
would be another 250GB+ or so. And because the contents are mostly
garbage, I don't even back that up. It's basically a "scratch" partition.

If you have indexing enabled, it might mean less stuff to index
as well. You could have C: indexed, and leave the data partition
un-indexed to save computing time. My experience here is, if you
restore the computer from a backup image, it resets indexing as
well, and then I have to put up with well over three hours
total compute time just to index.

If I had Windows 7 on my main computer, then a couple things would
change. I tend to preserve primary partitions on the main computer,
as it is set up for multi-booting. I'd probably make a single
partition for Windows 7 (no System Reserved), and give Windows 7
no more than the one partition. I don't like creating Extended/Logical
partitions, because they're just a nuisance to manage. (I tried
that in the past, and didn't like it.)

And no matter what you do, a 2TB drive is going to be both an
asset (never run out of space) and a nuisance (partition management
operations, copy operations, backup operations, could take forever).

I tend to buy drives in pairs, as a means of encouraging backups.
So when you have the 2TB drive, you should also buy space to store
its backup copy.

Paul