PC Hard drives; What do I put where?

Muspelheim

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Apr 7, 2011
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So, I bought a PC. It'll come in a box and all I've got to do is set it up and install. But I've got some questions about hard drives and how to manage them.

It's got one SSD on about 250GB, with a secondary HDD on 2 TB.

1: What do I install where?

I know enough to keep the system files on their own, away from games and other programs. But which drive would be best to install the OS on? What would be the ideal place for the other guff?

2: Partitions.

2.1: I assume you can't partition a drive while the system files are there. If it's necessary, how do you do that?

2.2: What would be a decent "split" of the space (250 GB & t TB)?

I've only got a very foggy idea what the difference between a SDD and HDD is, and I'd rather have a little less vague idea of what I ought to be putting where. Thanks for your time!
 

Albino Boo

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A SSD is a effect huge memory card like you get in your phone or tablet. It reads data and writes data much faster than an HDD but has shorter life span.

I would put the OS on the SSD, you will load in about half the time. You will have to move the virtual memory file to the HDD to prolong the life the SSD. Unless you are planning to do dual boot with another OS I wouldn't bother with partitioning the SSD.

What you do with you the HDD is largely dependent on your plans. I would partition off 50GB the 2TB drive for the virtual memory file but beyond that I wouldn't partition unless you are using more than one os. If that is the case spilt the drive down the middle and use 1 TB for each.
 

Muspelheim

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Splendid, googling how to set virtual memory files at the moment. Thank you for the reply, it helps out a lot!

Not planning on any other OS than the one I get, so it'll be nice and simple that way. I always thought hard drives lost efficiency if you didn't partition them up, but it's nice to hear that it isn't as vital as I thought.

What else can go in the SSD/OS drive? I want to give the OS plenty of elbow room, but it'd be nice to shove some other utilities there, too. What sort of stuff can and can't go on the same drive as the OS?

And thank you again for the help!
 

Albino Boo

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Hard drives do get fragmented but with modern drive sizes it doesn't matter that much. The big offender is the virtual memory file and if you give that its own partition that won't affect the overall performance.

You can put anything you want on the SSD but 250GB isn't a huge amount of space. If you are happy to manage your installed games then put steam/origin/ gog on there. Personally I can't be bothered and my steam folder is 250 gb by itself, so all the games sit on a hdd. If you are absolutely trying to max performance for a competitive shooter then install that on the SSD. If not just stick on your email client, office or whatever substitute and all the small utilities.
 

Muspelheim

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Ah, lovely! Glad it's not as sensitive as it used to be. Generous partition for the virtual memory and regular defrags and cleans all over ought to do it.

Yes, the size was what made me ask around so I could use it efficiently. I'm not really bothered about 99.9% performance, so if the difference isn't that big, I'll just shove the games into the HDD. I've barely filled 600 GB in five years, so I doubt space will be a problem for a long time.

Thanks for the tips, li'l boo! It's been very helpful!
 

Laughing Man

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Ah, lovely! Glad it's not as sensitive as it used to be. Generous partition for the virtual memory and regular defrags and cleans all over ought to do it.
Or you could just not use Virtual memory at all, disable it completely, assuming you have 8Gb or more of regular RAM.

Don't bother with defragging either, utter waste of time, you'll spend more time waiting for the drive to defrag than you will ever recover via the decreased read searches.

As for what to stick on the SSD, OS is a good choice and whatever your current hot game is, anything that requires a lot of drive access so large open world games that will spend a lot of time fetching info from the drives are usually helped by SSDs. Any games that are helped by having quick load times, some multiplayer FPS gamers will stick their favourite game on their SSD purely because the increased loading speed means they get in to the game before other folk.
 

Albino Boo

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I wouldn't disable virtual memory if you only have 8gb ram. Loading textures and decompressing them can cause a delta of 2gb. A large number of the current iteration of CoD have just found that virtual memory is necessary.