Programs on secondary hard drives

[NZ333AlphaAzieru]

This is probably a stupid question. Does the location of a program between two hard drives affect the program's performance?

For example, I have a primary 40 Gig Western Digital HD and a secondary 200 Gig Maxtor. I'm formatting both of them and starting out fresh with Windows XP. I'm trying to decide where my programs should be located on the hard drives and I thought maybe all of my computer games could go on the large secondary drive and all smaller programs, applications and other files could go on the smaller primary drive along with the operating system.

And what I really want to know is, do programs on the primary hard drive run better than they would if they were on the secondary hard drive? Or does it make absolutely no difference where I put any programs?

[Cricket]

Originally Posted by NZ333AlphaAzieru And what I really want to know is, do programs on the primary hard drive run better than they would if they were on the secondary hard drive? Or does it make absolutely no difference where I put any programs?

If both hard drives run at the same speed (5400RPM, 7200RPM, etc...) and have similar ATA data transfer rates (ATA33, ATA66, ATA100, ATA133), it shouldn't make a difference performance wise where you install the programs. The only time it would make a visible difference is if the hard drive with the programs is much slower than the primary hard drive...like if the secondary hard drive with the programs ran at 5400RPM and the primary hard drive ran at 7200RPM.

Cricket

[NZ333AlphaAzieru]

Well, both are 7200RPM so I guess there won't be any problems.

Thanks for the help.