Smaller drives tethered to purpose is even a step beyond the elimination of a brazilian headaches by keeping a clean impression of my preferred operating system / software makup PHYSICALLY separate from my data.

(Bundled hard drive divisions are pretty much for mental purposes anyway, ie, if your pet has fleas, they're gonna turn up everywhere.) My solution is to keep one a 500 GB external HDD divided into backups:

• spanking clean OS/Software makeups to reload when things get slow;
  
• indispensable cultural and recreational data; works in progress from the salt mines;
  
• R&D etc.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE:

I keep smaller individual external drives for big projects and related data. It's an administrative and economical no-brainer (works for me, anyway). External drives have come way down in price, but they're still too cumbersome and expensive even on a per-project basis. They're also designed to hold too much, but DVDs and flashdrives are too small and hold too little multimedia stuff. Plus, maintaining directories for them is a pain.

My Goldilocks solution was to geek up small laptop-sized (2.5") reformatted internal drives -- now available for next to nothing -- and put them into hard external enclosures like this one. If you know how to operate a screwdriver, you're good to go.  You get a nice, elegant, safe, organized storage system for work and play. You can tether to the inner netz, use the Operating System you like, record the crap you like and on and on.

Storage units are smaller than the palm of a child's hand, easy to back up and/or duplicate for archival purposes. Economical too and you don't have to go thorugh computer Karma if your system blows up. You can tether drives as necessary to the desktop or lapdog via USB port.

Great for anyone working on complex, longterm projects with a lot of background and research, and who likes / needs to keep all related stuff in one place (work in progress, data and ancillary R&D) but safe from cooties.

It's a nice, organized solution for creative types  and their big sound/vid files, or anyone working on a magnus opus. Also good for students, lawyers and hobbyists who want to keep accumulated data and research for longterm individual projects together in one cootie-free environment.

You can also keep a directory of each, and copy those into a master for easy reference -- who needs to go through dozens of DVDs? -- and simply copy older resources into a newer project without worrying about storage space or corruption.

I can also keep my surfing life separate from my grownup one with just the OS/wares for surfing and goofing around.

Collected junk is more likely to carry flea infestations and other cootification, and there's that tendency to cling to crap that matters not on second viewing (eg, My boss Mr. Harumphinton asking me why he got a copy of the "Leave Britney alonnnnne" soundbyte PLUS the same soundbyte "cleverly" mixed with sound loops from her singles when he only enjoyed the vanilla first one.)