I use a Western Digital 80 Gb, external hard drive w/ USB2 conection. This drive has its own power source and does not swamp the USB port. (Most USB ports are protected from shorting. If a device pulls too much current from the port, it shuts down and a re-boot is required to get the port running again. I have a 120 Gb Passport drive for my laptop and the inrush of the drive motor will shut down the port. A "Y" connector is required so that the disc drive can pull power from 2 ports.) To back up my importnt data files, I do not use a "backup" utility that uses data compression and put a group of files into a file set. This harks back to tape drives and limited storge space. I simply copy my important data files using the same folder (directory) structure as on the parent drive. Now, the back up copies are readily available by a simple drag and drop operation. For example, you may have financial data that changes daily. Its simple matter to periodically write copies of the current files to the back up space.

I will tell you what I go with, for my internal drives I go with Western Digital Black Caviar drives they are more expensive usually but extremely good drives. The last one I got was a 500Gig Black Caviar which I believe I got through amazon. For my external drives I like seagate free agent pro, I like their warranty and features. western digital black caviar

More memory is good but at some point there is a diminishing return on the investment and that point is a function of what you are doing with your computer. Things like first person shooter games, video editing, photo editing (of very large files) all benefit from lots of memory. Writing an email to Aunt Betty doesn't require very much memory at all because the computer can process information far faster than you can type. Same thing for the Internet, your computer can render pages faster than your connection can supply the information. So if you have a slow internet connection, you're not likely to experience much, if any improvement. With that said, 4 gigs is probably a pretty good number. If you really want a WOW factor, get a solid state drive and use that for your O/S and critical applications. To try and answer some of your questions: - Windows doesn't care about the physical drive or any logical partitions. It does make good sense to install Windows 7 on the newer, faster drive. You'll get the best performance that way. When it comes time to get rid of XP, everything will be on one drive and that, if nothing else, should help you keep things mentally organized. - My understanding is that you have two physical drives, one with a functioning version of XP and the other blank. If that is not correct, say so NOW. - When you go to install Windows 7, it will recognize that there is another operating system (Windows XP) already installed. Windows 7 won't do anything to XP other than to set up the dual boot. Essentially it's computer language that says, "XP is there, Windows 7 is here, which one do you want to use?" - Logical partitions to a drive a largely a function of personal preference. Understand that it is more difficult (but not impossible) to non-destructively repartition a drive after you put data on it. If you, for example, have a partition for music, another for videos, and a third for pictures and find down the road that you have a lot more videos than music, it becomes more difficult to rearrange things. My suggestion is a single, large partition and use folders to organize your data.

I have many times had to Replace Hard Drives that Crashed (at least 5). Use to take care of a couple Small Businesses computers. If it hadn't been for the Cloned Drives I would have spent countless hours reinstalling everything and restoring files. I too have lots of systems to oversee. No, many aren't mine and I can only recommend Backing up, cloning, etc... That doesn't mean that one will be done! We have 5 Laptops, 1 Desktop, and 1 Tablet all on Windows 10 here at my house. I only Clone 3 of those computers! My old boss lost her home computers hard drives twice, loosing everything before she learned to listen to me! I did get her started on a Cloning Program and it did save her the next time her computer crashed. Not sure what this woman did to her computers, but she had many problems. I do recall her saying they had power outages in their area all of the time, but she did have her pc on a UPS Battery Backup system. She had a ton of valuable information on her home computers, as did her small businesses computers which I maintained for her. Never had any problems with the Work Computers, maybe because she didn't use them (The Office Manager and Employees used them)! Yes, even a dormant hard drive can die, although I've never had that happen. The Business Computers I Cloned usually had Two Clones made. Usually One copy was in the Safe at the Workplace and the other usually stored in a Safety Deposit Box at a Bank!