May be because I have the C drive in the second SATA port and the other one in the first SATA
yes, that's the point I was trying to make.
I can tell you how I usually set up my partitioning scheme.
I allocate about 40GB for Windows 7, split the rest of the unallocated space into two, and the D: drive is where I install all my third-party software to, the E: drive is where I store documents, music, pictures, videos, zip files, etc
There are many speed improvements, it would take pages to compose. Basically prevent anything from running on startup except for your anti-virus, spyware detector, and personal firewall (if you have one).
You can tweak services by setting many to manual rather than Automatic Startup and you can...