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