In order to actually protect your main drive, you would need to do a lot more than just add a second drive.
Viruses and hackers don't just access the drive that mail files are stored on.
Most of their mal-ware seeks out and infects system files.
To have a second hard drive provide an increase in security you would need to set up your system so that you choose which drive to boot from and have 2 complete installations of an operating system.
The email installation would need to be W2K or XP Pro so that you could lock out the other hard drive.
An alternate way to make this work would be to have 3 hard drives and a "hot-swap" bay.
The hot-swap bay would be your primary master, or boot drive.
You would set up 2 trays with drives in them.
1 for email and internet.
The other for your applications.
The 3rd hard drive would be in the PC and set as the primary slave. This drive would be used for shared data files.
You would need to shut down, swap drives, and re-boot when switching between email and applications.
Looking at how difficult this would be to implement and use, I think you will agree that it is easier to keep your anti-virus and firewall software up to date.
Combined with safe browsing and email practices, you minimize your risk of infections.
Keep in mind that Microsoft OS's and applications are more susceptible to hackers for 2 reasons:
1. the hacker community holds a grudge against Microsoft.
2. since Microsoft applications have over 90% of the PC market, a virus or hack that goes after Microsoft security holes has a much better chance of spreading.
That is at least part of why more and more experts are suggesting that users at least try 3rd party solutions.
I myself now make much more use of Mozilla software for both web browsing and email.
Chas
