Adding a second hard drive to gaming rig without bottlenecking?

iroberts

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Apr 15, 2011
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Hello,
I recently built my first PC. I opted to go with a fast SSD to maximize performance, but I went with a smaller (126 GB) drive to save some money.

My question is this - How do I go about adding a secondary hard drive to increase storage capacity without sacrificing/bottlenecking the performance of the fast SSD? My understanding is to put the OS on the SSD, and then all other files (images, mp3, video, etc.) on the secondary drive...

I guess I'm a little unclear as to which files can all be put on the secondary drive though. I've seen people say windows profile data can be stored on the secondary drive - Is that the case? If so, what files would be beneficial to store there?

Finally - what about applications/games? Should all the program files be stored on the primary SSD? Or does Windows 7 allow you to store them on a secondary drive without sacrificing performance? How does that work?

Any feedback and advice into this matter would be greatly appreciated. I can generally follow tech jargon... but I'm still relatively new to a lot of this, so detailed instructions would be much appreciated. :D

Thanks so much in advance!
 

icy dock

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Dec 15, 2010
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Hey Iroberts,

As far as the windows profile data goes, I can't answer that one whether it would be beneficial to do that. But I think the general census is that put whatever you use frequently on the SSD(i.e browser, heavy processing applications); The rest should be on the secondary drive(i.e movies, music, documents). And for the performance in games/applications, you may not see better fps but you may see better loading times, generally speaking. Know that some applications are dependent on Windows OS files. So even if you install x application to the secondary drive, it may still install other files to the SSD. I am not sure if theres a way to prevent this.

I hope this explains a little bit about how many users are setting up their systems.