I suppose you don't need an E drive. What would it be for. You could simply have C: for system drive and D: for data. I put all my programs on C:. I have never seen an advantage for putting programs on a different partition.
I find that when an operating system fails perhaps during a power outage or something of that nature. The main partition usually becomes inaccessible/corrupt. While the other partitions are just fine. You're right about there being no performance difference, but I do it because of the aforementioned case.
Also, sometimes, people like to install programs on different drives. I have a 1TB Drive Dedicated to games. When running with an SSD, capacity is limited and it's best to use hard drives for storage. Note: I had all of these pre-flood times lol when storage was cheap. 1TB drives were barely 60 bucks at the time. 2TB were $80. As you can tell, Samsung and WD are my two favorites haha. Probably just WD now since Seagate bought Samsung :'(
My PC Layout: 128GB SSD Main - Win 7 and Commonly Used Programs 2TB Spinpoint F4 - Data Storage 1TB Spinpoint F3 - WorkSpace (My Documents, Music, etc) 1TB Spinpoint F3 - Programs (Steam Games, Virtual Machines) 1TB Spinpoint F3 - Movies, Recorded TV, Video-Projects 1.5TB WD Black - Just In Case/Temporary Storage 64GB SSD - Temporary Workspace/Quick VM/Etc. (I'm running out of drive letters lol)
Downside: Can't really afford a backup drive this large lol. Would need some sort of RAID enclosure with 4TB drives or something. No offsite backup. Will probably get 5-bay enclosure with some 2TB drives in RAID5E when the prices return to normal.
Keeping things segregated like this gives me great performance. Running Virtual Machines doesn't interfere with Workspace, etc.
Obviously this is complicated and beyond the scope of your setup. But the same principle applies. You'll likely want more storage than just what the SSD has to offer. So keeping data stored on a second drive seems like a good idea. You'll want to keep AC+SBS on the SSD for maximum performance. Data on other hand will do just fine on a separate drive. If you want RAID, set it up now. Or else it'll be complicated later on when you'll be creating and restoring images of drives to your RAID array. You'll likely end up buying an extra drive or two.
.png "ACUF Donor I")
