Partition

I have 3hdds so maybe would be better installing on my 80g and keep 500g and 250g for everything else? not really sure if having windows on it's own drive speeds things up?

Using different drives can speed things up, since Windows is usually constantly accessing things on the drives (DLLs, swapfile, etc.). It really depends on how much multi-tasking and switching you are doing.

Partitioning a drive will not speed things up, since all access is happening on the same drive.

I run five computers in my office. On the two that have only one hard disk, I partition the drive to about 100 gig on the C drive and the data goes onto the D drive. To partition the disk I go to "Start", "Control Panel", "Computer management", "Storage", and then "Disk Management". Right click on the unallocated area and then follow the "New Simple Disk Volume Wizard".

When I have more than one hard disk in a computer, I put the OS on a small hard drive and then use larger hard drives as D, E, etc. In your case, I'd use the 80 gig drive as C and then use the others as D and E drives. Its a lot simpler and safer to do it that way in my opinion.

Windows really limits how much fiddling and changing you can do on the boot drive C:. Some versions won't allow any such tinkering. You're lucky it will let you shrink to 50% of original size.

Since you have just installed Win 7, and IF you want to keep the 500 GB unit as the boot drive, I suggest re-installing Win 7 again. As the first step you will have to Delete all existing partitions. Then when you set up the new Partition for the installation, don't make it the full drive, Set the Partition size you want.

Re: the old drives. What you really should do is "Zero Fill" the drives. There are utilities for this. One tool is included in the free diagnostic tests suites that some HDD makers provide. Seagate has Seatools for DOS, WD has Data Lifegard. Their exhaustive test and Zero-Fill routines will write zeroes everywhere on the disk, making recovery of old data extremely difficult. These procedures also tend to do very thorough testing of the HDD so there are NO undetected bad sectors to deal with. AFTER that is done the HDD's will need to have new Partitions created and Formatted. But you might just leave them Un-Partitioned and let the buyer do that job - your choice.