Multiple OS's

I currently have Vista-32 as my OS on the only drive in my system. I am getting a new drive (SSD) which will have a clean install of 7 on it and that drive will become my boot drive.

My question is, what becomes of all the applications on the other drive, if I'm going to continue using it for storage? Will I be able to access any of those? (games, MS Office, Photoshop, etc.) What about all the music (iTunes) and image files I've accumulated? Can I no longer utilize what's on that drive because it has a different OS?

Thanks, I'm confused.

Based on my current build, are there any other upgrades I could make to increase the general performance? It's mostly just for gaming (WoW, CoD, DragonAge, etc)

Any of the programs / executables you currently have on the HDD (Games, MS Office, Photoshop, etc.) can be accessed and run from within Win7. If the app's are on the same partition as Vista, then I would create another partition on the HDD, then move them all to the new partition. Once that's done, format the volume containing Vista, then either merge the two volumes or use the empty volume as a secondary backup for Win7 image files and such.