Quote - When I asked him why, he showed me a couple of the “techy” sites that stated programs closer to the start of the disk are accessed faster

Technically - I suppose so. BUT 'a program' isn't just a monolithic piece of data, usually. It's all sorts of config, ini, dll and exe files which get scattered all over the place. Installing those programs first in no way guarantees that files are placed optimally on the disk.

In practice, who cares?  Something that will have a much more noticeable effect is defragging the HD regularly - use something like Raxco's Perfect Disk rather than the Windows defragger, if you can afford it, as this will place different file types on the disk optimally.

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Windows 10 x64 Pro - Intel Xeon E5450 @ 3.00GHz (x2)

PoserPro 11 - Units: Metres

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