swapping drives?

[cvol]

Hello, I currently have two internal HDD's, c: for OS and applications/data and a d: drive for additional storage. I just purchased a ata-100 500gb 8mb cache WD hard drive to hopefully replace my current 100gb c: drive. I have an external enclosure on order that I was going to use to clone the c: drive but while I wait for that to arrive, I'm wondering if it would be faster to temporarily swap out my internal d: hard drive(slave on IDE-1) with the new 500gb drive, clone my current c: drive to the new drive (using Acronis True Image 11) and swap my current c: drive with the new cloned 500gb drive? I was hoping to gain some speed as my current 100gb WD HDD only has a 2 mb cache where the new drive has 8 mb cache. Are there pitfalls to doing this? Will I see the whole 500gb or will the OS think I still have the old drive installed? Is there a specific procedure I should be following? I'm sure this has been asked before. I have been searching the forums to learn the correct way of doing this but the situations vary from mine.
Any suggestions are appreciated!

WinXP Pro SP2 installed, AMD 2800+

Thanks

 

[DeaconFrost]

I use Ghost for my duties like this, but I'm sure other applications would work. If I was handling this upgrade, I'd boot to a USB Flash Drive or a BartPE disc, and run Ghost from there. I'd ghost an image of the C drive to D. Then I'd power down, put the 500 GB drive in as the primary, and boot to whatever enironment I used the first time, and ghost the image down to the new 500 GB drive. You can choose the size of the target drive during the ghost process.