Originally Posted by shuttlebus
<blah, blah> Therefore, you are effectively limiting your primary channel to 15.5Mbyte/sec by attaching the CDRW.
Most mobos less than 5 years old can handle the different data rates and won't slow down the HDD.
Moving the swap file to another drive or partition won't affect speed or fragmentation, but it's a good idea to limit the size. If you're worried about fragmentation then run SysInternals free PageDefrag once a month -
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.html
I always put the OS and apps on one partition (preferably drive) while data lives on another partition (preferably drive). NTFS is more robust than FAT32 and much more secure. Even some modern apps expect to be on C:\Program Files even though they say you can install them elsewhere. Data is mirrored to a Linux machine on the network. Odds & ends and copies of all the drivers live on a FAT32 drive. Backup and drive imaging is another story.
As shuttlebus says, it's a good idea to move most of those special folders to your data drive.
6GB is a bit small for the Windows OS what with all the crap MS installs.