Disc allocation for Time Machine advice needed

[MacKenzie999]

Hey hey kids...

While I await my new Mac Pro I'm wondering what the best strategy is for allocating disc space in regards to setting up Time Machine. The four drive bays will be occupied by the following drives: 1tb, 320gb, 320gb, and 160gb.

This is my home system and the only real work I'll be doing is in After Effects (I also use it for regular home stuff like iTunes, the web, email, Quicken, etc) . It seems like a waste to use that 1tb drive just for Time Machine backups, but I also haven't had great experiences in the past with partitioning. Perhaps things are different in Leopard, which I have yet to use.

So, the question boils down to this: how would you allocate these four drives? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

 

[JNB]

Remembering how TM manages itself re the periodicity and deletion of old incremental data, I don't think there is a real standard. Basically, how much data is being backed up initially, and how far back in time do you want to go? I'd have to say, though, that absolutely no less than 1.5-2X the drive space required to hold the current data.

I've got a 160GB HDD which currently has about 60GB of data. My TM partition on the external is 232GB, and about 174GB has been taken up thus far. I'm not limiting what is backed up, and It's been running since October 26. That should give you an idea of growth rate.