Dedicated HDD for OS?

Hello.
My current HDD situation looks like this:
Hard drive 1, SATA: Two partitions, one 10GB partition (Drive C) one 130GB partition (Drive G).
Hard drive 2, PATA: 40GB capacity

My friend has given me one of his hard drives since he just bought a new computer. This drive is 160GB, but, it is also PATA. With my motherwise I can only have two devices (that I can see) on PATA, and so I have my 40GB HDD and my DVD burner hooked up to it. I have 3 empty slots for SATA(IDE?) connections.

Since I have the extra SATA connections available, I am also thinking of buying a cheap 20-40GB drive that connects with SATA and installing my operating system on that. My question for you guys then is: Does keeping the operating system on its own hard drive improve performance at all? I have read that it can, but is it worth the effort?

>>1 With my motherwise I can only have two devices (that I can see) on PATA

Does your mainboard have one IDE slot or two? They make 2-device cables, y'know.  "Master and slave" sound familiar?

>>Does keeping the operating system on its own hard drive improve performance at all?

Sure. OS on primary partition should have better seek times because of its location on the drive and should be easier to defrag, backup, reformat.

>>2
You fail so hard.

Hard disks and CD/DVD drives should not be on the same PATA controller.  It's usually just asking for trouble. And the location on the physical disk makes no real difference anymore.  Welcome to last decade.  That said, keeping frequently changing files (like the OS or swap) and mostly static files (like your music, movies, documents) on separate partitions does reduce fragmentation and makes reinstallation much easier.  (It would be best if you separated the general OS and it's temp files, but in Windows, that really more trouble than it's worth.)  Also, you may want to consider having your OS, data, and swap space all on different physical disks to reduce latency.

>>3
Fuck you. You're the one that fails hard, especially at reading. Did I ever tell OP to slave and master his 40GB HDD & DVD burner? No. But then again, maybe he doesn't use shitty components you and can slave his friend's 160GB to his DVD burner with no ill effects.

>>the location on the physical disk makes no real difference anymore
Welcome to July 2006. Consumer hard drives now have 187GB+ platters and allow single partitions that are larger than ever (750GB). Enjoy your +12.5ms seek times, rapid fragmentation, and slow boots.

>>3,4
Both of you are arguing over stupid shit, enjoy your aids

in the typical setup (two hard disks and two cd readers) you want one hard disk and one cd drive on each controller. Fail for not knowing how the pata bus works.

MFM/RLL 8-bit controller cards FTW

>>6
Just beacuse it's typical dosn't mean it's optimal.
The only reason why it's done this way is beacuse it makes the transfers cd->hdd and hdd->cd go faster.
if you use your secondary hdd as a program storage it's better to keep it HDD+HDD with CD+CD.

But this is also a bit depening on the functionallty of the PATA chip aswell.

And >>1
just to clarify:
If you have Two IDE connectors on your motherboard, it can support up to 4 IDE Devices, 2 on each connector.

And yes it does improve preformace (of the OS) if you keep your os on the primary harddrive alone, however you will loose preformace when starting up programs that are not on your primary harddrive.

These differences in preformance are however not that noticable for the common user.

>>4
>>5
www.opera.com

I'm sorry, I got my terminology wrong.

For whatever reason, this computer only has one IDE connector, so I only have one ribbon with two PATA connections, which is currently my 40GB hard drive and my DVD burner. I have a connection for floppy drives, but I don't use a floppy drive.. (If I can switch that one out for one that would work with hard drives, I'd like to know how. I'm thinking it's not easily possible, though.)

Anyway, thanks for most of the replies

>>10 I have a connection for floppy drives, but I don't use a floppy drive.. (If I can switch that one out for one that would work with hard drives, I'd like to know how. I'm thinking it's not easily possible, though.)
Try IMPOSSIBLE.  Get a PCI IDE controller. ~$30USD

CMD640 FTW