I work at a webdevelopment company and we're all getting new PC's. Our plan is to run a dual-boot system with Ubuntu and Windows 7 or 8.

I've setup a few of these systems so I know the how of it, installing Windows first, shrinking the partition etc.

What I can't seem to find, despite reading many topics about the subject, is a way to determine the ideal partition layout.

At home I have a 320gb disk divided roughly in 200gb for Win, 10gb swap, and the rest for Ubuntu itself. I've seen no need to make a shared partition for both systems so I just gave both more then enough to work on their own.

At work we've only got a 128gb SSD to work with and we absolutely need some kind of shared space since we'll be running both windows and ubuntu for developing and testing sites and apps.

Now I know Ubuntu kan run find on less than 20gb, less than 10gb even.
The system will have 16GB of ram, so I suppose the swap partition should be about the same size for hibernation purposes, probably somewhat smaller.

Windows is a disk hogger usually, but I can set most of the paths to the remaining partitions so that would help a lot. Would 20gb suffice in that case ?

So that would leave me with 20gb Ubuntu, 16gb swap, 20gb Win and about 72gb for shared storage.

But I'm not sure if this is the best division. I would probably need to install most of the windows applications on the 72gb partition. Perhaps even the larger Ubuntu apps, not sure.

And what format would I use for the 72gb ? I suppose NTFS since that's fastest for windows and ubuntu can work with it. Are there any performance issues for Ubuntu in this case ?

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this.

Thanks in advance