Multi SSDs & HDD with Win 7

[Kingfish]

Got a couple of quick questions about my setup.

I was late getting to the SSD party and last week dipped my toe into the water a bit by getting a 64GB Samsung 830 SSD...i liked it so much I bought another! I got a 128GB version Samsung 830 and was planning on just using it as my boot and main game drive and give my wife the 64GB one.

BUT, now I am wondering...is there a better way to incorporate BOTH the 64 & 128 into my system together? She don't need it and wouldn't appreciate her solitare games and Horsez playing faster anyway

So, I have a 128gig SSD, a 64 gig SSD and a 500 gig HDD for bulk storage. Any suggestions as to the best use of these or how to arrange them? Any tricks that the experienced SSDers know and wouldn't mind sharing?

And one last thing...I found on the 64gb drive, I needed to remove the restore point for Win 7 to give me enough to install SWTOR...should I remove that on the 128gb drive as well...

AND

What is the purpose of the 100mb drive that Win 7 creates when you first install the OS?

Thanks for your time,
K

[Chillin]

Originally Posted by Kingfish

Got a couple of quick questions about my setup.

I was late getting to the SSD party and last week dipped my toe into the water a bit by getting a 64GB Samsung 830 SSD...i liked it so much I bought another! I got a 128GB version Samsung 830 and was planning on just using it as my boot and main game drive and give my wife the 64GB one.

BUT, now I am wondering...is there a better way to incorporate BOTH the 64 & 128 into my system together? She don't need it and wouldn't appreciate her solitare games and Horsez playing faster anyway

So, I have a 128gig SSD, a 64 gig SSD and a 500 gig HDD for bulk storage. Any suggestions as to the best use of these or how to arrange them? Any tricks that the experienced SSDers know and wouldn't mind sharing?

And one last thing...I found on the 64gb drive, I needed to remove the restore point for Win 7 to give me enough to install SWTOR...should I remove that on the 128gb drive as well...

AND

What is the purpose of the 100mb drive that Win 7 creates when you first install the OS?

Thanks for your time,
K

Two part question:

1)- I would use the 128GB as a boot and main drive since it is faster than the 64GB version. You can use the 64GB for games and the 128GB for programs (and a few games that take advantage of SSD's like ARMA2, etc) and boot.

2)- The 200 MB partition is the "System Partition" required to boot windows and facilitates a clean way to activate advanced features like enabling encryption on your OS volume. Note that it is marked as the Active partition.

When you start your machine, the stuff in the System Partition (like bootmgr, BCD store) gets loaded first (since the partition is marked Active). Next, the bootmgr loads up full fledged OSes (like XP, Vista or Win7) located in other larger OS partitions. This 2-phase approach allows Windows to quickly and easily load up the bootmgr without having to worry about advanced disk or volume functionality offered by drivers like BitLocker. In the second phase, the advanced functionality can be activated when the overall OS loads up.

Simply put, it's for boot and recovery. If you have an EFI machine, you NEED this partition (EFI system partition), and if you ever want to recover (or convert to bitlocker), this is also helpful (not required, but helpful).

[scheherazade]

I would use the 64 to boot, and 128 for your programs.

The difference in boot time(s) [between 64 and 128] will be under a second.

And how much of our computing time do you spend booting?

Most of your loading time [after boot] will be loading your programs (utilities, game levels, photoshop scratch space, etc).

'1 boot' vs 'many application loads'

-scheherazade

[Chillin]

Originally Posted by scheherazade

I would use the 64 to boot, and 128 for your programs.

The difference in boot time(s) [between 64 and 128] will be under a second.

And how much of our computing time do you spend booting?

Most of your loading time [after boot] will be loading your programs (utilities, game levels, photoshop scratch space, etc).

'1 boot' vs 'many application loads'

-scheherazade

It's not just boot, most program caches, etc., default to the C (boot) drive.

[scheherazade]

Originally Posted by Chillin

It's not just boot, most program caches, etc., default to the C (boot) drive.

Content development apps (~all [professional] 2d/3d tools) let you set your cache/scratch location.
(Which for me is a separate ssd dedicated to cache/scratch/temp, which isolates the large volumes of low-value data-writing to one non-critical drive.).

my /users/<name>/... temp etc folders are empty.
Other than browser caches (which I didn't care to move, even though I could).

Even if the application doesn't let you set a temp folder, you can just make a symbolic link (with ntfs) to elsewhere on another drive (re-directing the writes).

Also, pagefile performance is irrelevant with sufficient ram.

-scheherazade

[Barry J]

i have multi SSD system

c: 128Gb M4 windows7 x64 few programs
d: 60gb vertex2 my accounts few progs
e: 60gb vertex2 games
d: 64gb M4 games

i use 500gb Usb harddrive to backup all drives

used to use 60gb vertex2 for OS got sick of checking available space would say 128gb min for boot/OS drive