Adding second used hdd to get speed, asking for tips.

MrGoATi

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Sep 9, 2016
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hello,
I have a pc with 1Tb of storage, and i found an old 0,5Tb storage hard drive that is spit in 3 parts and has windows and some other things in it (nothing that i need)

1 I wonder can i delete everything on that drive or format it? or i have to leave some things in it?
1 I want to know how can i increase my pc speed using that 0,5Tb storage drive

i play games, download a lot of movies and would like to upload most of the time, currently my hard drive is at 100% a lot of the time even without uploading

so programs,games,windows and files like movies that are used to upload a lot of the time are all in 1Tb what should i replace into the 0.5 tb drive or should i do something different with it to speed pc up.?
 
It depends. If you're running out of RAM and leaning on a page file then adding a second hard drive could speed things up. If you do your downloading and uploading using that drive it will mean less competing disk access on the first drive. If it's not RAM related, 100% disk activity could indicate a software issue, a physical hard drive issue, and almost anything in between.

But to answer your first question, if your OS is on the 1 Tb and the .5 Tb is just a drive you found lying around, yes you can safely erase anything on it. You can delete partitions and reformat it and it won't affect anything on your primary drive. But at the same time, it probably won't make anything on your computer any faster.
 

MrGoATi

Commendable
Sep 9, 2016
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i have 16Gb of ram memory so it's at 10-40% most of the time
i have tried and checked many things to see if i have problems about that 100% disk usage, but i found no problems,
thanks i will from now download and upload files in 0.5Tb hdd

so upload files in 0.5tb and games,software,windows in 1tb ? or should i also focus on adding more software to 0.5 Tb ?
 
If you're at 100% disk usage all the time then there is definitely something wrong. If you can find the cause of that, it will definitely make your system faster. If you open Resource Monitor (from the performance tab of Task Manager) what does the Disk tab show as having the most disk activity?
 

I assume you're using bittorrent. A lot of BT clients write downloaded files piece by piece as they download them. So if a movie is downloaded as 1000 pieces, it'll be written to the drive in 1000 different places. This badly fragments the drive, causing everything to slow down and your HDD usage to spike to 100% even when you're not torrenting (other programs had to write to the fragmented drive, and their files are now fragmented).

One solution to this is to get a second drive or create a second partition used solely for BT downloads. The better solution however is to look for an option in the BT program to pre-allocate (or reserve or some similar term) the space for the file before it begins downloading. This will write the movie as one continuous file, and fill in the pieces as it downloads each chunk. Your hard drive stays unfragmented.

Starting with Windows 7, Microsoft made Windows automatically defragment your drive once a week. But their defragmenter is not very good and can get overwhelmed by a badly fragmented drive. Try running it manually (right-click the drive letter -> Properties -> Tools -> Optimize and defragment) to see if this might be the problem. If it is fragmented and the defragmenter seems to be overwhelmed, move (or copy and delete) as many files as you can to another drive, defragment the original drive, then move the files back.
 

MrGoATi

Commendable
Sep 9, 2016
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after adding the second drive for some reason the drive usage is very low at times i'm not doing much. unlike before when doing nothing was still generating 90-100% a lot of the time.
not sure how helpful the torrent files location will help but i think it should make it much more convenient to use torrents(Tixati) and gaming, and doing other things.

will also reinstall windows and make my 1Tb into 3 partintions, and put my windows on the 0.5Tb drive splitting it in 2partitions. as i somewhere read that more partitions slightly help as well. plus it will help with organizing.

though i wonder do i need to download all software in same partition/drive as windows, or is it completely irrelevant or is it relevant to some software. could in that case probably use one partition for games , 1 for movies and stuff, 1 for most software,1 for leftover files, 1 for when others are full.