3 Drive system

[Play-N]

Hello,
Is it better to install a three drive system example - SSD for system only, Raptor 10000 rpm for programs, and 7200 rpm for data files. Or use a ssd for system, and partition a large drive for programs and data?

 

[nukemaster]

Os and the most important programs games on the SSD (C
All other less used programs on the raptor (Any letter you want, just dont chance it once you start installing programs there)
Personal files/desktop(windows allows moving of special folders to another drive. placing the desktop here will save space on the SSD if you happen to pile files on the desktop like I do.) on the last drive (same as above)

That should work well.

Please note that if you reinstall windows in the future, the hard drive with programs may not run all programs right since some files for many games/apps will still reside on the SSD(C

The reason I recommend this way is because when you are accessing personal files or the desktop, they will not effect the speed of either the SSD(like it would be effected ) or program hard drive. With a partition, the drive head would have to jump(back and forth adding latency) more to utilize the 2 partitions at once(playing a game[from the HDD] and accessing files).

 

[Play-N]

Thanks for the reply and information. I have started purging programs from my ssd and running them from the raptor. I really don't see any increased times using the programs, maybe a little longer on actual load times. Anyway it is fast...

 

[sminlal]

I use three drives. I place all programs and my personal profile folder on the SSD. I store all my active documents on the first hard drive, and all of my rarely-changed archival documents on the second. This makes it easy to have a backup strategy which gives me the most frequent backups of the stuff that changes most often.

Having two hard drives is also good for tasks that require large file copies so that you can do these from one drive to another instead of thrashing a drive by copying files to and from the same spindle. For example, I run several virtual machines and I reset them between uses by copying a template file from one disk to another.