Working with partitions

[Manick2005]

After recently reformatting my machine I decided to try partitioning one of my hard drives to see if I could speed things up a bit for my operating system and regularly running processes. I am completely new to the concept of partitioning and only sort of understand how it works, so I would like to ask an important question about program files, but before I ask here is what I have been doing so far.

I have two HD's, one being a 640GB Western Digital (32mb cache), and the other being 250GB Seagate (8mb cache) with both running at 7200 RMPs.

1) I installed windows on the C: partition, which I made 80GB in size using my Western Digital. I installed drivers, regularly running processes, start-up applications, and other critical system files on this partition.

2) Prior to formatting I saved all of my personal files by directly copying the entire "My Documents" folder to an external HD, which was 90GB in size. I partitioned the remaining 560GB (volume F:) on my Western Digital for the purpose of holding these kind of files. I was also initially planning on using it to install the majority of my program files like AutoCAD, Photoshop, and other applications I had purchased for practical use.

3) I created a single 250GB partition (volume E:)for the entire Seagate HD capacity, which I hadn't determined what to use for yet. I thought about using it to just store archived/zipped data as backups and almost never run anything off it. But since it is an older HD I am not really sure if I want to entrust it to any responsibility because of my constant fear of hard drives dying on me without warning. I've had two recent cases of hard drive failures that happened almost instantly without much warning at all, which caused me to lose hundreds of gigabytes of data which was irreplaceable, and had since then made me very weary of any hard drives reliability.

My question now, is this: Can I install programs on my drives besides the C: volume without any consequences? I have always realized that some programs also create additional folders under user names (e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\) to store extra data, like a cache or user settings. I noticed that at the very least, when I install a program on a different drive other than C:, that I cannot remove it via "Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs", and must use an uninstaller that came with the program, assuming it has one.

Is it perfectly fine to install programs on different drives or partitions that aren't native to your system files and user settings? And if I do install these programs on other partitions, where should I install them in order to see a noticeable difference in how fast they load?

[exile360]

The way I have my system set up is the OS AND programs get installed on C: (to avoid issues like you had with the uninstaller, I've seen other problems occur as well, depending on the program). Then redirect the My Documents by right clicking it and selecting Properties and on the Target tab click on the Move button, then browse to the drive you wish to store it on. I'm not sure about the actual performance gains between using separate partitions on a single drive, but I do know that having only my programs and OS on a seperate drive from everything else has improved my system's performance.