Question New build - Need Advice on partitioning Drive

[Caveman]

PC currently has Win 10. Plan is for clean reformat to Win 11 and partition for multiple kids. There is a single, 2TB m.2 drive that 3 users will be sharing. 1 adult will be the admin and have a few games and a server for DCS flight sim co-op play. The 2 kids will have their own partitions for installing games of their choice. All 3 users need access to common programs like the MS Office suite (Word, Excel, Power Point). Kids will also have parental control software installed.

Goal is to only have a partition matched to each kid with all other drives hidden to make things simple for them and prevent other files from being overwritten. My understanding is that I can make separate partitions that can be hidden from the other users so they only see their drive.

Adult Admin account will be 600GB, Kids will split the balance of the 2TB. I'd like to be able to grow/shrink the partitions in the future if needed, but more of a nice to have.

Any advice/direction before installing Win 11? Do I make the partitions during the Win 11 install? Will it prompt me for that?

Any advice/comments are appreciated. Thanks in advance.

I know these sorts of questions from a guy with the signature rig are a bit weird, but I rarely install OS and when I have, they only just have a single account and partition so it's dirt simple. Also, I only set up the OS once every 5 years or so...

 

[Seba]

Are the separate partitions really necessary for this case?

Just make 3 separate user accounts, with different rights.

 

[mikeymikec]

I'm inclined to agree with Seba. If I felt it was necessary to create three partitions then I would triple boot, but like with the obstacles created by three users signing in, triple boot creates even more obstacles.

With your three partition suggestion, chopping up a 2TB drive into three portions leaves about 600GB each. Modern games will chew that up in a heartbeat, and chances are you'll end up having multiple installations of the same game. The only reason I can think of to start partitioning would be if at least one user is such a liability that their playground absolutely must be kept separate from the others, but the only way I can think of doing that is either with another non-Windows OS or with encrypted partitions, creating even more headaches.

Unless one of them is a massive data hoarder, I would trust to a shared data space and only come up with a new plan if that one falls apart, and then you'll have more information about why it fell apart.

The other thing I would consider is that we're talking about kids here. Aside from game installs, why would they want lots of space? While I would like to think that my hypothetical kids would share my sensibilities about wanting everything physical and not trusting the cloud, I'm not naive enough to believe that they would become clones of me. Chances are they'll do what society conditions them to do, at which point if they have phones then space will be used up there. If I deleted all my ripped movies, music, family photos, porn and business-related data, I'd need about 500MB of space.

Also, if you have Steam installed and up to 3 people wanting to play a game, are you going to buy it three times or try to manage when it wants to put save data in the cloud by default?

 

[WelshBloke]

Are the separate partitions really necessary for this case?

Just make 3 separate user accounts, with different rights.

I seem to recall that you can set disk quotas per user as well, so OP could end up with the exact result that he wants without lots of individual partitions!

 

[manly]

I seem to recall that you can set disk quotas per user as well, so OP could end up with the exact result that he wants without lots of individual partitions!

KISS. Disk quotas is a reasonable solution.

Set Disk Quota Limit and Warning Level for Specific Users in Windows

How to Set Disk Quota Limit and Warning Level for Specific Users in Windows

www.tenforums.com

 

[Caveman]

Thanks so much for the advice! This is the kind of stuff I was looking for and yes, I like the KISS concept.

I'm thinking about making the main admin account (me) the only one that can install anything... But... then I wondered if I do... Can all users use that single install? Or, do I need to install a new game for each kids "character" in the game (guessing this is how it works so each person has to pay to play, etc...). Is there anyway to install a game and have it available to all the users or only a few that can use it? If 2 kids want the same game, then I have to install it twice if it's not the type of game that you have to login and make a profile to play?

 

[mikeymikec]

Has anyone actually used the disk quota feature on Windows? How well does it actually work? It just seems to me like it could be one of those features that Microsoft added eons ago and then left it to rot.

Single installs - depends how old the game is / how it works. For example, many older games put save game files into the game folder. More well-behaved games will store user-specific data in a user-specific location (e.g. %USERPROFILE%\AppData). The other thing to bear in mind is that some software is possible to install in a user-only context, e.g. Google Chrome can be installed for a single user in that user's appdata folder.