D was typically a CD-ROM drive. So when CD-ROMs went the way of the dinosaurs, where did D go ? Is it always some kind of SYS drive nowadays ?

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tom_ 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's just whatever happens to end up there? That's why D was typically the CD-ROM: A was the first floppy drive, B the (typically absent) second floppy drive, C the only hard disk, and then D was the next free letter.

On my laptop, D is the SD card slot. On my desktop, it's the 2nd SSD.

	▲	xoxxala 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		When recordable CDs were brand new, we set up a station at work with two hard drives (C: and D:) and the CD burner (E:). Naturally, the CDR burning software was hard-coded for D: but didn't mention that anywhere (including the error message). Took us a few hours to figure it out.
	▲	hilbert42 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"That's why D was typically the CD-ROM:" We used to set our machines so the CD-ROM was always drive L. This way we always had 'room' to add HDs so there was no gap in the alphabetical sequence. Drive D - data drive, E - swapfile, etc. Test and external drives (being temporary) were assigned letters further down than L. Sticking reasonably rigidly to this nomenclature avoided stuff-up such as cloning an empty drive onto one with data on it (cloning was a frequent activity). Incidentally, this rule applied to all machines, a laptop with HD would have C drive and L as the CD-ROM. Machines with multiple CD-ROMs would be assigned L, M and so on.

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Kwpolska 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Depends on your setup. These days, I have a D drive for sharing data with the Linux install I never use. I used to have a D drive for user data (to keep them safe when reinstalling Windows) back in the 9x/XP days (and my CD drive was E).

I also use the drive letter assignment feature, so my external USB drive is always drive X.

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tetha 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On servers, D is commonly used to push data / vendor installations / other stuff you may want to backup separate from the OS off of the main OS drive C.

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rzzzt 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

C: is the boot partition with the DoubleSpace driver, D: is the compressed volume.

	▲	lepicz 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Stacker compressed volume ;)
	▲	badc0ffee 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		DriveSpace, surely

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kijin 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

D usually refers to the second internal storage device these days. Either a second SSD, a large HDD, or an extra partition in your system disk. If you don't have any of those, a USB stick might get the D drive temporarily.