Hard drive

Since your program folders are on the second partition your best use of the new drive would be for storage. While you can boot live with a GParted live cd in order to copy the entire partition from one drive to the next the present location is a main factor as far as the system registry is concerned.

One of the main problems of seeing programs installed to secondary partitions/drives is once something is changed they no longer work! Besides registry values new shortcuts to the new location are needed for those programs which will still run from the folders themselves.

And? The one thing you are not looking at there is the new registry entries created by each program's installer.

Copying a partition itself is basic with a number of programs available. Getting the programs to work afterwards even when changing drive letters is another. You'll likely need to reinstall at least some of the programs to have those working again due to how each program was initially set up.

Simply changing the copied partition to D wouldn't solve any registry problem since you are also changing things physically to a separate hard drive. This is where things will get tricky there in order to have everything working over performing a fresh install of each with brand new reg entries and shortcuts.

As for oerformance that's always a mixed debate there with many custom installing programs to secondary partitions and drives in order to free up the OS primary. If you start filling the second partition now D on the host drive too fast you may wish later that the second new drive had been used for storage while leaving the first unchanges.

Presently I have two 1tb drives set aside for storage and would like to grab a 2tb for backing those up at some point. You would surprized how fast a drive will fill if you are regularly adding new files to any partition or drive!

When testing began on the 7 beta builds here I soon found myself pulling a drive out of the external usb housing it came in to allow for more space. That was on top of one 1tb drive later to see a second one added in for storage. The 1tb model now in replaced the first 500gb pulled out of the usb enclosure!

When buying the second 1tb WD Green Power to add to the first that was also simply pulled out of the external case and installed internally. The lower end drives by each manufacturer seem to be the series used for external drives there. Once Raptors grow in size or SSDs come down in price..... who knows!

I just saw one review a few days back on a WD external drive with the USB 3.0 interface. The blog writer reported that it was 4.7 times faster then the equivalent 2.0 version! Ponder on just that and wonder how fast other devices will see transfer rates! eureka!