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[Tom <question79072@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Question #79072 on Ubuntu changed:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/79072

Tom posted a new comment:
Hi again :)

Programs get installed to / but Windows programs installed in Wine get
installed to /home and i am not sure what happens in virtual machines.
The question is less about where they are installed to but more about
where do the read/writes happen?

I think there are a couple of folders, such as the logfiles folders, that could normally be usefully placed on a separate physical drive from the OS, or even mounted into ram on a ram-drive.  There is an old Tom's Hardware bench-marking/destruction-testing that suggested the multiple rapid read/writes (as happens with logfiles) could be 'slow' on an Ssd but i think things have moved on a lot since then and are improving rapidly.  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Comparison_with_hard_disk_drives
Really tho i would keep things as simple as possible to start with and you're already considering options that are far more complex then you really need to worry about.  

Getting a new drive and dealing with fstab and chown is a bit beyond me, really not my area at all.  However, i think that having a /home partition separate from the / means that an entry for it appears in fstab - so when you copy /home onto your new drive then it should be a lot easier to edit fstab to point at the new partition, the fact that the new partition is on another drive is a minor detail that 
sudo lshw -C disk
can help you with anyway.  (i copied that from the link you gave me)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingANewHardDrive
it's a lot less complicated than it appears and i wouldn't even start worrying about all this for the initial install.  If you want to have a look at an fstab on a linux machine then try

gedit /etc/fstab

although other distros will probably use some other text-editor instead
of gedit so just replace gedit with whatever the distro uses.  Some
other popular ones are; vim, vi, nano.  Note that by not opening this
system-file with SuperUser rights it's safer to have a look at because
i'm unlikely to accidentally change something and then save the changes
;)

Anyway, good luck and regards from
Tom :)

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