maybe a dumb question

was wondering, if I buy a second hard drive, and store ONLY vista on it. would that be a good idea (performance wise).... If i were to run absolutely everything off a much bigger harddrive? would it matter for performance in the long term (like 4 years from now) 

it seems like my current windows goes slower the older it gets, maybe its just me....  but if i had one hdd for windows and another for my music, games, etc, and made the first one around 40-80 gigs and the second on 320 gigs... 

thanks! 

this may be a moronic question,  im gonna have 2 gigs of ram and i think the e6320 in april; on a newer mobo w/ the potential to upgrade to the quad core at a later date (when they are cheaper) and was gonna throw in a 600 w ps w/a 8800 gts 

oh this makes me think of another question, whens the 8900 series come out? and whats the final date on the 8400 /8500 ? 

Hard drive seek time is hard drive seek time, no matter if it's running on drive 1 or drive 100.  The computer still has to seek out the infomartion, where ever it is, process it, and then display it.  In other words, it really doesn't matter if you isolate the OS from the rest of your information...you can even isolate the OS on the same drive, by partitioning the drive into smaller pieces...I know, I know, partitioning?  Some people actually still do this.

Also, and maybe more relavant(?), windows tends to 'slow dow' because we have a tendency to install more little programs that need to start when windows starts..for example...when you first install window sthere are only a couple of little icons in the task bar, but my computer right now has sixteen icons.  All those programs have to run when windows starts.  This is mostly likely why the machine slows down.

 Of course, having the OS on a seperate drive is nice for a couple of reasons specifically...when you need to install the OS, again...or if you need to ghost your personal information.

 Does that help?