How do I best utilize my SSD and HDD?

[buu11235]

So, about a year ago I decided that I wanted to build my own PC for upcoming games/general use. In doing so, I picked up a small SSD and a larger HDD with the intent of using the SSD for boot up/primary games (LoL for right now), and my HDD for lesser games/music/photos/etc. I had manage to make the SSD the boot drive and put the two games I played the most on it with room to spare. However, whenever I tried to download something new, and put it on the HDD, I would get some sort of error, and resort to putting it on the SSD, telling myself I'd sort it out later, since I still had room on it.

Well, now the SSD is getting rather full, and I'm still looking for a method to manage my data storage in a more organized fashion. As of now the HDD has nothing of importance on it (a few odd files that i have backed up on flashdrives).

So my questions are as follows.
1) Would a simple solution be to install Windows 7 on the HDD to allow a simple drag and drop kind of deal?
If this is the case, I feel it would need to be (or would be better off if) reformatted. Yes? No?

2) Is what I am describing called something that I am unfamiliar with, and can therefore do a more precise search? RAID was the closest thing I could find & understand(somewhat), but that seems to draw from multiple HDD for a faster load time. Is a RAID with a single SSD pulling from a single HDD what I'm looking for?


Thanks for any help, and if you guys need anymore information I can do my best to provide it.

 

[RetiredChief]

1) Raid0 will do little to Improve Load time of OS and programs. OS load an program load times are Highly dependent on small 4K random performace. Unfornunatly Raid0 only improves on Sequencial performance, which is the least important paramerted for OS + programs.
2) If you raid0 a 60 gig SSD and say a 1TB HDD you end up with a SINGLE drive = 120 gigs. which flushes the 940 Gigs of the HDD down the toliet (Can not be used).

2) You can use the smalll SSD as a cache for the larger HDD. this would improve boot times as most of the files used in loading the OS would be loaded into cache;
SEE: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/intel-z68-chipset-smart-response-technology-ssd-caching-review/2
NOTE: requires an Intel chipset.

Bottom Line: Personally, I'd start shopping for a larger SSD.

 

[willard]

1) Raid0 will do little to Improve Load time of OS and programs. OS load an program load times are Highly dependent on small 4K random performace. Unfornunatly Raid0 only improves on Sequencial performance, which is the least important paramerted for OS + programs.

Actually, RAID does improve latency in random reads, but only at high queue depths. Basically, a RAID array can serve two read requests simultaneously, halving latency in the best case. In reality, the improvement is much lower.

 

[RetiredChief]

^ (1) You are correct. (2) I was refering to day-today-performance.

A) Raid0 does NOT improve access time, Unless you employ short stroke. Ie My wd 640 Blacks have an access time of 12.6 mSec. Using short stroke I cut that time to 9.5 mSec. Disadvantage of short stroke is that approx 70 persent of disk space is wasted.
B) Typical stripe size (default value) is 64K. However, approx 1/2 of files on an OS + program drive, and placement (which drive they the required file is on) can not be controlled - Highly dependent on installation sequence.
C) Raid0 is still usefull for Working with large data (File) structures.

Up untill SSDs ALL of my systems employed Raid0 - and that pre-dates SATA drives.