Hard Disk paritioning advice

[Mr_Man]

I need suggestions/feedback on this hard drive partitioning scheme. I plan on getting a 640GB WD Caviar Black and installing Windows (7 or Vista, haven't decided) and Ubuntu 9.04. I wanted to partition as intelligently as possible so that disk writes for similar things can stay close together, with the most-used parts having priority on the outside of the disk.
Here's my current scheme (image below).

Windows: The Pagefile would be first, on its own 3GB partition to prevent fragmenting, then a 85GB Windows install with programs, games, etc. would be second.
Ubuntu: 3GB Pagefile as with Windows, 15GB /Home partition, then 20GB for /.
Last would be free NTFS (370GB) where media (video, pictures, music) and anything else would go.

Notes- The computer will have 4GB RAM and a Phenom II X4 (not sure which). I'll have some kind of pro-sumer or professional video editing software and 3-4 games installed on Windows.

I'm mainly wondering:
1- Should the Linux / and /Home partitions be switched around, or the Pagefile moved around?
2- Should any partitions be bigger, and could any of them reasonably be smaller?
3- Should the last partition be something formatted as something besides NTFS? It just has to be read/writeable by both Windows and Linux.
4- Am I trying too hard for too little? Even for an enthusiast?
Any other comments or suggestions are appreciated.

 

[sminlal]

Seems like it's fairly well thought out to me. Which OS do you expect to use most of the time? If it's windows then you might consider swapping it's pagefile and OS partition with the Linux ones so that it abuts the data area.

Have you thought about getting a second hard drive? They're fairly cheap, and it makes a lot of sense to have the OS on one disk and the pagefile/datafile on another.

 

[Mr_Man]

I'll be using Windows most of the time, unless Ubuntu turns out to be smoother and more responsive than it is on my current machine (compared to Windows).
I've pretty much ruled out a second hard drive for now. I plan on getting an SSD eventually, but not for quite some time.
Why would I switch the Windows pagefile with the Linux one? Wouldn't doing it the way I said put the appropriate pagefile closest to the matching OS's data?

 

[sminlal]

Why would I switch the Windows pagefile with the Linux one? Wouldn't doing it the way I said put the appropriate pagefile closest to the matching OS's data?

I didn't say to move just the page file, but the pagefile and the OS partitions. So you'd have the Linux Pagefile and the Linux OS partitions first, then the Windows pagefile and Windows OS partitions, and then the data partition.

The idea would be that if you use Windows most of the time then this will go a little ways towards reducing seek time between accessing the Windows OS files and your data files because they'd be adjacent to each other.

 

[Mr_Man]

Ah, I see what you're saying. Would that make up for the fact that the OS would be further away from the edge of the disk? To my understanding, stuff on the outside of the disk has the fastest throughput. Then again, out of 596 useable MB, the 38MB difference may be almost nill. Guess the only way to know for sure is to try both and benchmark them, but that would be a little more time-consuming than even I'd like.

 

[sminlal]

I'd be pretty surprised if the difference between having the pagefile at LBN 0 and LBN 0 + 38GB would make a detectable performance difference on a 1TB drive.