Use an ssd as a boot only drive

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heartbreak-one

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Jan 25, 2015
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use a ssd as a boot drive and hdd as storage? How can i have only windows files on my ssd and user files and program files on my hdd. can i somehow link my program files folder on my ssd to my program files folder om my hdd so if it tries to install it to the ssd it will automaticly install to my hdd? thanks in advance.
 
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Andreamorim112

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May 3, 2015
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P.S: Back up your registry before doing this... Do so by opening regedit (mentionned below) and clicking File > Export > Save. That will save you in case of failiure :)

Open regedit (Start > Run > "regedit"). Then find "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion". Now look in the right pane. Change "ProgramFilesDir", "ProgramFilesPath", "ProgramW6432Dir" and "ProgramFilesDir (x86)". If your secondary drive letter is D:\, then change them to "D:\Program Files", "D:\Program Files", "D:\Program Files" and "D:\Program Files (x86)", in that order that I just mentionned. You should be good to go from here.

Quoted from LeetLawrence. In http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-1792156/secondary-harddrive-question.html
 
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mudpuppet

mudpuppet

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Jun 20, 2012
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Im not certain about automatic (I imagine theres a way but I'm not familiar with it off hand) but when installing say a game, you can tell it to install to the D drive and have a shortcut from the D drive to your desktop to move files there and off the C drive. You should be able to change the default destination for downloaded items to a different drive/folder.
 
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aolish

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Dec 15, 2012
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What most people do (at least this is what I do) is put their OS and applications/programs onto the SSD while putting all data files and games onto the HDD. The purpose of this (at least in my opinion) is to make the SSD as clutter free as possible and only have the core OS and application files on that drive only as opposed to putting in everything onto that SSD.

In addition you STILL (tho not as good as an SSD) get the benefits of a FASTER HDD loading times (at least from what I'm seeing, I could be wrong) simply because you only have your data there instead of tens of thousands of OS and program files as well as data cluttering up the spinners which severely impacts performance on an HDD.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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OK, here we go:

Do NOT try to force all your applications to be installed elsewhere. Why?
1. You are tossing away a large part of the benefit of the SSD. You want your applications to run just as fast as the OS.
2. Some applications WILL choke not being installed on the C drive.
3. Applications usually don't take up that much actual space. A 120GB SSD will do just fine. I'd prefer a 250, but a 120 will do.
Games, music, video...those things take up a lot of space.
4. What drives are you using? Type and size?
5. What do you use this system for?


What size is this SSD?
 
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heartbreak-one

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Jan 25, 2015
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ok i have 128gb evo and i just dont want it to get too clutterd since i will only put certain programs on it like photoshop and maybe a game or two i want to have its main purpouse be a boot drive. also when installing drivers and programs like nvidia geforce and similar do they go to program files or some other folder i mean the drivers for the card
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Drivers pretty much become part of the OS. Just let them install to where they want to go.
But they are tiny. Of no consequence size wise.
 
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jsmithepa

jsmithepa

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Jun 14, 2014
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You can certainly install your Apps on, say d:\program files, but if you follow a disaster recovery regime of making image backups of your boot partition, and since OS and Apps cannot really be separated, you will have to deal with backing up two partitions each time.
 
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