Using 2 hard drives to speed boot and performance

[imagemaker5150]

To All-
I recently spoke with a tech rep at Corsair memory. In the conversation, he gave me a recommendation to use 2 hard drives to keep my system running fast. I use Adobe Photoshop which uses a lot of ram and I want to have a very quick response from my computer. Basically he said get a small hard drive (40MB or thereabouts. As fast as I can find) also use a larger storage drive for the system and other applications. When installing Windows XP Home he said put the boot info on the smaller drive and indicate the larger drive to install the system on. This will keep the smaller drive free and will run much faster.
I understand the idea, but I've never installed Windows XP on anything other than 1 main drive. Anyone out there familiar with this procedure. According to the tech rep, it would be apparent how to do this when installing the op system, but basically pay attention to where files are being put. If you've done this before, I would appreciate any further explanation. I didn't want to appear to be a dummy, but now in re-thinking, I'm not sure I follow. Thanks for your help.
Peace, Out.

[Rob]

One way to do this is to use a smaller capacity, faster Western Digital Raptor drive for the primary, C: drive, and a less expensive, larger capacity, still pretty fast hard drive for the secondary drive.

Install the OS on the C: drive and set the Virtual Memory to the C: drive, setting the Initial and Maximum to the same size - the maximum value. I mention setting Virtual Memory on this page.

http://www.mysuperpc.com/build/pc_assembly_needs.shtml

The idea is to keep disk fragmentation to a minium. A fragmented disk can slow down performance.

All of the applications should be installed on the secondary drive. It may also be necessary to setup a separate partition for the brower temporary files, and assign it to use it.

In theory, this sounds like a good idea. In practice, I'm not sure how much difference it will really make. Simply using one hard drive and maxing out the Virtual Memory allocation may result in nearly the same improvement. I don't know - just guessing. I'd be interested in hearing other opinions or - even better - seeing any measurements.