So im wondering if its possible to set up something along these lines: SSD with win 7 and some apps, a hard drive for all the rest of the data and apps for windows 7. Plus a second hard drive with Gentoo and Manjaro in dual boot plus one more large hard drive to be shared between all OS's. Is this doable or more trouble than its worth?
it is doable but you'll have to switch boot priority between the SSD and the Linux HDD. Or as alternative use boot options (usually by spamming f12)
Yeah it's doable for sure. That is pretty much the setup I use - though as Anhur has suggested I use F12 on startup to access linux when I want to use it.
In short, I have a laptop with an SSD with Windows 8.1 on it and core software, and Ubuntu on a 1tb HDD. I then have a third HDD formatted in NTFS that I install games to from Windows and use as a general data storage drive that is accessible from either OS.
I'm pretty sure the Hackintosh boot manager (multibeast I think) would work here.
I'm sure I've seen people have Mac, Win and Linux and when it boots you can select one. I don't think you have to use mac os which would solve your problem. If no one here knows try asking over at Tonymacx86.
Easy. Just make sure you install everything to the HDD's you want and do some folder management. You may even see a speed improvement as windows is loading from the SSD, Other apps load from HDD's. I personally use 3 HDD's in RAID0 to basically triple the speed of a single volume and then partition it as necessary. However I would warn anyone interested in my config away from it as the risks of lost data is high.