the first partition is the fastest part of the disk (the outside edge) this is reverse from DVDs/CDs
for most drives the first 40% is the fastest. so what you really need to consider is the size of the 4 programs plus the operating system.
for me on a 1TB drive, my partitions are:
300gb primary.
700gb (roughly) secondary.
these are your C: and D: drives. because i mostly store disk images on drive D:. i set the block size from the default of 4k to 64k.
the block size controls the smallest unit of measurement used by the partition. so if you wrote a small text file (less than 1kb in size) it would still use a full 64kb minumum.
I do that because it shrinks the size of the file allocation table (FAT) and makes searches and drive access a bit faster. it also makes reads faster since data is retrieved in 64k chunks instead of 4k.
