Shared storage vs separate storage

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Hi all,

Decided to finally dual boot my Win7 with a linux distro, Mint 15 in particular. While I have my mind set on what I plan to do with each OS, I'm a bit undecided on the best route for partitioning my hard drive would be. Now, from what I've read and understand I'm more than capable than creating a third partition to share data across Windows and Linux, but I'm not sure if I want to.

My main goal of using linux is to use it as my coding work station for my computer science projects/classes, whilst still having the multimedia capabilities that I'm used to with Windows (gaming, adobe products, etc). So would the best route be to create only two partitions, only larger? Or should I create four partitions, two smaller for the OS's and two individual larger storage partitions?

Sorry for the silly question. The answer might seem obvious, but I'd like to know your opinions.

Thanks!
~Charlie
 


Well, it really depends. Do you NEED to share information between platforms? If so, then a shared partition is possible. Maybe 3 partitions, Windows, Linux / and /home, and shared. (/ and /home are on the same partition). Or, maybe Windows, linux /, linux /home, shared. This also depends on the hard drive size. Also remember that windows needs either NTFS or FAT. Linux needs a filesystem with the ability to assign security bits.
 
I'll agree with ryanvade it comes down to a personal preference and how much you need to actually share data between OSes.

Since you're asking opinions though, I'd prefer to keep the OSes separate. I'm not a fan of lots of partitions though, I prefer to have one OS per computer (I'm a bit of a computer junky though so I have plenty to play with.)

I still rarely have the need to move files between computers as I use Linux almost exclusively for programming and server work and Windows is really only for gaming. And if I do I have plenty of devices to do it. Google Driver/iCloud/cloud storage of choice, external HDDs, flash drives, etc. I would give the space to your OSes and if you absolutely need to transfer something use an external drive. If you have problems with text file compatibility (rare) check out dos2unix:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dos2unix/
 

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