It is a good idea to create master images on “tiny” drives and have either a script resize the final (or OOBE in windows do it). I always create my golden images in a VM with jsust enough HDD space to do what I want (I expand the drive if the image gets bigger). That way you can use whatever size final drive you like.
You can always script extra partition creation too. I have a script that resizes and creates an extra partition and moves a folder into that partition for my W7 images. That way I can use smaller drives as appropriate.