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?

>>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.