Just wondering what everyone uses a second hard drive for. Just for extra storage, can a program be installed and run off that second drive? Right now all I use is c: drive, but I also have d: drive which only contains a recycle bin. Never saw a need to use that drive so far. Thanks

The advantages of a second PHYSICAL hard drive, AS WELL as a second partition of your only hard drive are many. First, it give you a place to store files, so that if you ever need to reinstall the operating system, you don't lose all your files. I've got a completely separate physical drive, which Iuse ONLY for this---pictures, and in fact, entire web pages on various informative stuff that I don't want to lose. You must remember that if something "appears" on the web, it can also disappear. I have a completely separate partition on one or the other drives which I use for only setup files, and Ghost images. That way, if the C: drive crashes hard, I just go back and get the latest image, and about hte only thing I lose is a few bookmarks/ favorites.

... also, some folk like to put their swap file onto another HD so that it doesn't fragment so much. If you have a small HD (whatever I mean by that these days LOL) then it might be neater to keep to one drive because it makes somewhat better use of limited space. DerekW

You can install your programs on another drive and also put your 'Favories', 'My Documents' and 'Emails' on a separate drive so they won't be loast in case of a windows collapse.

My policy - after lots of changes and back-tracking - is to have the OS and the program files on C: On another partition I have an image created with Norton's Ghost. I make a new one of these whenever anything new goes on the C: drive. That means that if anything starts playing up I don't spend much time trying to fix it; I just go back to the latest Ghost image, and replace it. The swap file should be on the most-used partition of the least-used drive. This means that the head is likely to be closer to the swap file when it is called on, and being on a different, less-used, physical drive the chances are that that drive will not be doing anything else at the time. Having the swap file on the C: drive means it is likely to have to interrupt some other process to get the swapped file. I move my desk-top, Favourites, My Documents, Address book, a couple of Quick Lauch folders, Send To to another partition so they don't get 'lost' when I restore the OS. Also all those files dumped on the desktop don't take up space in the image backup. Terry@nz