On W
On Linux, there are three possibilities which mitigate all these
things:
1) Use LVM. You can use the entire drive as a single physical volume
(PV) and then carve it up into separate logical volumes (LVs). This
allows exactly the same strategy as above, but you can start with
the minimum needed size for each partition and leave the remaining
space unallocated. Should you need additional space for any of the
volumes, you can just extend it on demand. Downside: space allocation
is manual and some degree of space wastage still occurs.
2) Use Btrfs. You can have a single Btrfs volume, and then use
subvolumes for all the separate parts, divided up exactly as above.
The subvolumes may be independently snapshotted, backed up and
preserved. The rootfs itself can be a subvolume. The main problem
here is that Btrfs isn't production ready, so I can't recommend it
unless you don't care about your data.
3) Use ZFS. Allocate the drive as a single zpool. You can then create
zfs volumes for all the separate bits. However, you don't have the
space wastage issues since all the data is in a single pool, and
you can adjust the size allocations/quotas on demand for each
individual volume (or leave them unset to give them as much space as
they can get). Needs a kernel patch for the zfs driver. With
kFreeBSD you can do this natively. It has all sorts of great
features which I won't go into here.
I've tried all three. For Linux, using LVM is easy and can be done
in the installer. If you reinstall you can keep the LVs you want and
wipe/delete the rest.