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?

>>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.