Driver placement

[nerd by night]

Hey guys, first post here. I just got my new SSD, and I am doing a clean install of windows. I want to know if I can put the drivers in my HDD to save some room or will effect the driver preformance?

 

[price_th]

Not sure I follow what you're saying. Drivers are loaded into the windows folder as part of the OS install. What do you mean?

 

[CaedenV]

Drivers are typically very small, there are many lists of other ways to save SSD space that are much more effective.

 

[nerd by night]

Well when I do the clean install I can see the driver folder in my SSD that has the OS. Can the drivers be placed in my HDD and still run as needed or is it not an option or just a bad idea?

 

[mesab66]

No - bad idea to move OS folders - don't!!

As price said. I wouldn't worry too much about the space drivers take up - certainly when compared to the rest of the OS.

Install the complete OS on your SSD. Of course, you can chose where to install all your other programs/application i.e. put some of them onto the HDD if you want. But if you can, place as many of your frequent used programs onto the SSD, for obvious reasons (not essential but very desirable).

Enjoy your new SSD - you'll see a helluva improvement.

 

[nerd by night]

Drivers are typically very small, there are many lists of other ways to save SSD space that are much more effective.

Yeah, it's probably more of a pain in the @ss to do that. I did free up some space by disabling hibernate, that was 9 gig just itself.

 

[CaedenV]

drivers exist on 2 levels. Physically they are in the system folder within the OS, but logically they exist within the registry. So long as you modify the registry properly then you could technically put then wherever you want. Please note though that this would be in the category of 'all time dumb ideas' just to save a few MB of space.

Plus, every time you need to access something in your hardware (which the drivers control) the computer will have to wait, spin up the HDD, find it, and then load it.... this entirely defeats the point of the silent and fast seek times of an SSD.

Look instead into removing things like pre-fetching, disabling (and deleting) the virtual memory (which will save you as much SSD space as you have of RAM, which adds up quickly). Also, move things like your downloads folder and other bulk-file folders to the HDD. These kinds of changes will save you GB's of space instead of the little bit of space that drivers take up, and they are much simpler to move.

If you simply have too much stuff to fit on your drive, and you are more concerned with game loads rather than overall/consistant performance, then do a little research into Intel RST SSD caching. The advantages are not as good as running off the SSD directly, but it can be much simpler to set up and use than trying to remember where you put everything as you will only see one single drive. The big limit here is that it will only cache up to 60GB, which is entirely a stupid arbitrary number picked by Intel. RST could be much more useful if you could use a much larger drive, and use it as a cache for much larger drives or RAID arrays.

 

[nerd by night]

drivers exist on 2 levels. Physically they are in the system folder within the OS, but logically they exist within the registry. So long as you modify the registry properly then you could technically put then wherever you want. Please note though that this would be in the category of 'all time dumb ideas' just to save a few MB of space.

Plus, every time you need to access something in your hardware (which the drivers control) the computer will have to wait, spin up the HDD, find it, and then load it.... this entirely defeats the point of the silent and fast seek times of an SSD.

Look instead into removing things like pre-fetching, disabling (and deleting) the virtual memory (which will save you as much SSD space as you have of RAM, which adds up quickly). Also, move things like your downloads folder and other bulk-file folders to the HDD. These kinds of changes will save you GB's of space instead of the little bit of space that drivers take up, and they are much simpler to move.

If you simply have too much stuff to fit on your drive, and you are more concerned with game loads rather than overall/consistant performance, then do a little research into Intel RST SSD caching. The advantages are not as good as running off the SSD directly, but it can be much simpler to set up and use than trying to remember where you put everything as you will only see one single drive. The big limit here is that it will only cache up to 60GB, which is entirely a stupid arbitrary number picked by Intel. RST could be much more useful if you could use a much larger drive, and use it as a cache for much larger drives or RAID arrays.

I have already done the pre-fetching and disabled hibernate. I was looking ate the virtual memory but wasn't exactly how to adjust that according to the amount I ram I have. I'm not sure about what settings to set it with. Any advice on that.

 

[CaedenV]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-performance-tweak,2911.html