Applications on Seperate Drives

Well I have 5 Drives laying around, 3 Sata and 2 SCSI, and I decided to use two of these one for Windows XP and one for my applications. And I have a series of questions

1. Can I run my apps on one disk (SATA) and Windows XP (SCSI) on a seperate disk?
2. Will this impede performance?
3. What happens if I have to reinstall Windows, does this mean I have to reinstall the programs
4. How can I reinstall Windows and still have the apps work from the seperate drive, and if there is an a type of app that can do this what do your recommend?

1. You can install applications on a separate disk if you wish. Just have to change the default installation path when installing them.

2. Cant see why it would impede performance.

3. & 4. You will generally have to reinstall your apps if you reinstall windows. This is because when you install applications they make changes to the registry - if you reinstall windows you effectively reinstall the registry therefore losing any changes you made to it. [You might find that some apps still work though]

Having apps on a secondary drive will increase performance.If a game or app crashes it will not screw up windows at the same time.A repair install will work as far as keeping the apps working.I use an extra IDE to ghost my drives to but it will not work with most sata drives.There is no app I know of that can accomplish this.I have backed up the registry using an emergency repair disk with 2000 but am unaware if that it can be done with XP.

shadowdr said:

Having apps on a secondary drive will increase performance.If a game or app crashes it will not screw up windows at the same time.A repair install will work as far as keeping the apps working.I use an extra IDE to ghost my drives to but it will not work with most sata drives.There is no app I know of that can accomplish this.I have backed up the registry using an emergency repair disk with 2000 but am unaware if that it can be done with XP.

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Just because it's on a separate drive doesn't mean it won't affect Windows if it crashes. It still runs in the OS. Other than installing programs to a different drive, THEN ghost a image of your boot, cant' see the long term advantages