[robomartin]

All of our development machines have multiple drives mapped to specific functionality:

    C: System
    D: Data (business data and main work area for product design data)
    F: Library (stuff you rarely touch, PDF's, books, references, "knowledgebase", etc.)
    G: Backup (external)
    S: Swap and Scratch Files (this is actually a RAM-based 128 GB drive for speed)
    Z: Development (mostly for web development, VM storage, etc.)

The idea is that the C drive can be taken out and shredded and the most valuable part of the computer, the data, is unharmed. Decades ago I learned --the hard way-- that storing your data on the same drive as the OS/system files is a dangerous thing.

The other thing this facilitates is backup. You can backup and restore each of the logical/functional units separately, as full drives.

This also makes upgrading the system or the entire computer far simpler. The separation between OS and data makes it so.

Way back when, before the registry was a thing, you could upgrade your OS without having to reinstall the applications. While I understand the advantages of common DLL's and the centralized management of common settings and code, I do miss the ability to not only separate data from the OS, but also applications. I don't think that is ever coming back.

[dragonwriter]

> S: Swap and Scratch Files (this is actually a RAM-based 128 GB drive for speed

Isn't it better to just have the RAM as RAM than to have the same RAM used to provide swap space on a RAM disk?

[sneusse]

Thats what made me smile to :) Swap trying to swap RAM to RAM then suddemly: swap recursion :)

[robomartin]

Sure, yet, it depends on what you are doing.

One of the primary motivations for using a RAM disk was to not beat-up SSD's with the kind of access swap space gets.

The advantage of a hardware RAM-based drive is that it is extremely fast. When these machines were built, this was the fastest way to get data on and off a swap drive.

Today SSD's are super fast. On some machines we now have a separate dedicated 250 GB SSD for swap. If it craps out, you throw it away and pop in a new one. No worries about comingling valuable data with swap space.