Should I have the faster drive as my secondary?

[DumpALump]

I was thinking of putting my 250gb drive as secondary and keeping my 80gb as my primary(OS Drive). It would boot a bit slower, but it already boots fast enough as I need it to. Considering the second drive wouldn't be used by windows files I would set games and most programs to run off the secondary drive thereby decreasing load times for programs. Or should I just set the 80gb as secondary with the virtual memory and have the 250gb as the main?

Don't really care too much about windows boot time, but I figure game boot time + game speed would increase if the 250gb was the secondary. Not sure if this is correct though.

[dawei213]

What is the speed of our 80gb? 5400 rpm? 7200 rpm? How much cache?

Well, you should always have your primary OS on the faster drive for everyday performance, especially because of Window's habit (i'm assuming that's what you are using) of constantly going to the virtual memory. Any applications within Windows will load some information into the virtual memory.

[soulfly1448]

I prefer to have the larger drive as the secondary as Windows has a habit of expanding and expanding for no reason other than the fact that it has more room to do so.

[zexmarquies01]

me and my friends like to put larger drives as our secondary, and 3rd HDD.

those hold all of our music files, Games, and extra stuff on the 2nd or 3rd HDD. and never use the C drive to install anything on it, other than windows itself.

the way i see it, the less crap that is on the OS drive, the less it will get fragmented, less chance of weird problems, with only windows on the main drive, windows itself runs faster, since it doesn't have to bypass/sort through all the other stuff to get to the program.

If i could get a cheap 5 Gig HDD at 7200 RPM's, i'd set that for my OS personally. Less space on the OS drives means less chance of me getting tempted to move files over to that drive. plus less stuff can get cluttered in there, and slow windows down.

Also, we install all our programs onto the 2nd HDD as well. Like Firefox, Xfire, AIM,MSN...etc..

That way, if windows for some reason does need to be formatted, we don't lose any files. we just have to re-install our stuff ( which isn't a problem, since we are installer pack-rats, we have installers that we have used 5+ years ago still ).

I like to keep my C drive as clean and empty as possible.

i'd sacrifice 2 seconds of boot time, for a stable OS that doesn't bork on you when a program crashes, or slow down due to a full HDD, Plus needs defragmented a quarter as often as my other drives.

basicly, if windows doesn't NEED it installed on the C Drive, then it doesn't get installed there. If it NEEDS it, ( direct X, Drivers...etc..etc.. ) then those are the ONLY things that goes onto that HDD...ever.

and our OS's are a snappy and quick as anyone elses. Programs load the second we click them, we get very little lag from windows. Menu's, folders open up instantly.

my friend hasn't formatted his PC in over a year. and if anyone here sat at it, they would think he just did a re-install of windows yesterday. Its as quick as it was the day he formatted it.

right now, i have files on my C drive that shouldn't be there. but thats because my 160 gig HDD died on me. And because of that, i'm VERY short on space at the moment. so i'm stuck using my C drive to hold extra files, which normally would never be put there.

when i buy another HDD ( probably a 300 gig SATA drive ), i'm going to move files to that, then reinstall windows. and stick to my guns again on my own personal computing rules.

But thats just how we do it. and we have never had a single problem doing it this way. and we will continue to always do it this way.