>>I understand that many (most?) people like to partition their HD so that C: has all the OS and products and D: has all their working (personal) data.
>>In such a case they are paying a penalty every time they access their working data because chances are good that the OS or the active programs refer to C: frequently, for anything from their executable components to their temp files in Documents and settings...
>>This means crossing the whole of C: including a bunch of empty space every time that happens. And in the reverse direction too.
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>While that may be true, the total of the time saved by having all of the primary disk in one partition will be lost the day when that partition crashes :).
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>Didn't happen to me for quite a while, maybe 3-4 years, but still... and I've never lost anything from other partitions.

My current "solution", aside from regular backups of important stuff to another physical HD (NAS), is that I endowed my system with a RAID mirrored setup for C:.
Don't yet know if it works though < s >