Best practices are patterns that have proven themselves over and over again as a way to achieve a high quality of your solutions, and it’s completely irrelevant who proposed them.
Hi Trevor, any specific reason why SharePoint should never be installed on any drive other than C:? I am assuming here that SharePoint might search and communicate with system files which are residing already on C: drive in contrast to which if SharePoint is installed on D or E then SharePoint might fail to locate the required system files and start throwing exceptions.