SSD and HDD help

So I have recently bought a vanquish ii L4 with a SSD and HDD that is currently sitting underneath my Christmas tree. I have never dealt with managing two separate hard drives before and wanted to get some information about which drives would be the best when I install steam/iTunes/origin etc.

Should I just install Steam on the HDD with all of my games? What about ITunes.

Sorry I know this question has been posted before, but I have been unable to find the previous post I had read about this. I just want to be prepared so that minimal time is wasted on Christmas morning.

Thanks

I have a large ssd drive and i just put all my games on that

Mellers way of putting it: Go big or go home

Let's get down to brass and tax. And enjoy this Bowler, because I don't just hand out advice willy nilly now a days.

If you ordered a PC with an SSD and a HDD, it'll come as such:

C:/ will be your SSD
D:/ (or whatever lettering it got) will be your HDD

Everything you go to install will default to your C:\. Most of the time it will be your C:\Program Files (x86) or C:\Program Files\.

Managing two drives is extremely easy. And I'm not saying this because I'm experienced, but because it literally is extremely easy.

My recommendation goes pretty much with what has already been said. With the exception of steam, this is what I'd do for games and everything else.

Most used programs on your C:\. Itunes can go on your C:\, but I'd just put it on your HDD, as speed of your SSD won't really matter, and music/movies can really pile up on space used. I'd also install all of my games on my HDD, not your SSD. Once again, this doesn't include steam.

You'll want all of your movies, music, and possibly even documents on your HDD, unless you have a larger SSD. (something like a 256GB or larger SSD). I say documents included, because windows updates, along with every time you download something, etc... can really start to pile up. People tend to forget to delete stuff out of their download folder.

Now your games. Install them on your HDD, and just drag and drop them onto your SSD when you're ready to play. Then back to your HDD when you're done. This allows you to benefit from your SSD speed while playing (increasing load times, and what not) but you don't have to worry about running out of space by installing all of your games on your SSD. Just move them on when you want to play, and off when you're done.

Steam is the one exception. You'll want to install it onto your SSD. Now, you can move your steam library folder every time you want to play a steam game, but then you go to go into steam, and readd the directory, so that it rediscovers the game. it's a heart ache.

Summarize it up.

Movies, Music, (itunes), documents, less used programs, games on HDD.

Most used Programs and Steam on SSD.

Questions?

Meller, you are probably a better sys-admin than I...could it be possible to put placeholders on your C:\ drive and have it point to a location on your D:\ drive so you could have your games on a secondary drive and not have to constantly fiddle with it all of the time?

Does Steam not load most of the critical portions of the game into memory? Is there a particular reason why calls to the hard drive need to be fast? All I can think of loading of a new level/environment, but once it is loaded, you're good to go. I'm just trying to understand why the effort you are talking about is worth all the trouble.

Is there any way in which someone can create a virtual partition that the O/S can handle the pointers for? Therefore, whether the data is on the HDD, SSD, or even a RAM drive, the O/S will point any calls for data to the correct location.

Yeah, I get the whole RAM disk migration need...you can set up temporary drives to host games and play off of the RAM solely, for that seamless gaming experience.

I wasn't suggesting that Bowler do this, as you are correct that it adds plenty of complexity; I was asking it more for general knowledge...I appreciate the feedback.

I've gone the route of everything on SSD, but that is partly driven by an old laptop of mine that only had a single drive space in it, and I've taken that drive and put it into my Bolt II. I would be interested in experimenting with RAM drives in the future, when I have more memory in a computer to allocate partitioning space.

Originally posted by Meller It's just a pain to move your steam library back and forth, just because you have to constantly redefine it's location in steam, which is why I say just install it directly onto your SSD and leave it though.

With something like SteamTool you don't need to redefine paths in Steam, just click the arrow to move games back and forth between locations. Saves a fair amount of time.

I didn't use any of the earlier iterations, but I haven't had any issues since I've used it.