Installing games/programs to second HDD

[WangChung]

OK, first, I'm familiar with how to edit the registry to change the default install drive path. Second, my plan is to install Windows and any drivers, codecs, and system utilities (anti-virus, mobo/temp monitor, etc) to C:, and install games and Office and the like to D:\Program Files. Just wondering if anyone's tried this? I'm hoping to get a faster load time with games and better overall system performance. Pretty sure I'm just going to turn off the pagefile as I'm installing XP x64 and installing 8GB RAM. Thoughts? :)

[twilyth]

I used to do that all the time and never had any problems. I never tested it to see if it was in fact any faster since that wasn't my primary reason for doing it. If you're really concerned about speed and the 2 drives can be used in a raid array, then I would set them up as raid 0 (data striping) and would consider an SSD for my boot drive.

btw, there are external drive cases that will give you raid 0 and which are bootable if you want to go that route.

[WangChung]

I used to do that all the time and never had any problems. I never tested it to see if it was in fact any faster since that wasn't my primary reason for doing it. If you're really concerned about speed and the 2 drives can be used in a raid array, then I would set them up as raid 0 (data striping) and would consider an SSD for my boot drive.

btw, there are external drive cases that will give you raid 0 and which are bootable if you want to go that route.

:) That's exactly what I'm doing. I'm using some 80GB seagates that I already had for the OS stripe, and two 500GB seagates for the secondary stripe. I'm expecting some decent results. :up: Thanks for the feedback!

[Sparky]

I've always had my games and my documents and storage on D: and windows and apps on C:. That way, if/when I reformat I don't have to do much if any backing up. In my case though D: was just a second partition on the same physical drive as C: for me.