Thoughts on the ideal home network/file system setup?

[StompAWOT]

So it's about that time of year when I blow up my computer, reinstall everything, and start from scratch with a clean drive. I've historically offloaded important pictures, docs, files, etc to an external HD and then just reinstalled my OS. In the past I've had 4 partitions, including OS, Program Files, Files and Emergency.

That worked fine when it was just my computer...but now I've been married for almost a year and a half and I realized last year at this time that my wife didn't like my scorched hard drive policy.

This year my plan is to take some of my old components and build my wife a rig of her own. She can then do whatever she wants on the computer without me going in and messing around. Rather than have one of ours be the repository for our digital photos (we both like messing around with them), I'm thinking of going w/ some sort of NAS setup (like Ximeta, Buffalo Linkstation, etc).

Any of the experts have any home setups with a spousal unit that they'd recommend?

Secondarily, is it really beneficial to have an OS, Program File & File partition. If not, what is the prevailing wisdom about configuring Hard Drives?

Thanks & Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays to all of you!

 

[cirthix]

network=4 port router and a few cables, nothing fancy

files=external hard drive. have a pictures folder and a folder for each of you to put whatever you want on it.