What is a Boot Drive?

[microtechsteve]

I currently do not have a boot drive and it takes about 1-2 minutes to boot up my PC. My storage is a WD Black from 2008. I've only heard about boot drives but do not know they sole purpose. What are they and do I need one?

 

[InvalidError]

The "boot drive" is the drive you designated in BIOS as the drive the BIOS needs to load the OS from. In other words, it is the drive your OS is installed on.

 

[Imacflier]

You have a boot drive: it is your WD Black. A boot drive is simply the drive containing the partition containing the operating system. That is, the location of the instructions read into the computer which load the operating system. So, yes, one is mandatory, but it may also contain more than the operating system. It still is your boot disk. It is possible to put the operating system onto a very fast drive such as a Flash Drive. This will dramatically speed up loading the operating system. Depending on what applications you use it may also speed up the operation of those programs.

Larry

 

[microtechsteve]

The "boot drive" is the drive you designated in BIOS as the drive the BIOS needs to load the OS from. In other words, it is the drive your OS is installed on.

Is it worth getting one? I have a 500gb hdd

 

[smorizio]

with hard drives if yours is almost full your better off buying a bigger hard drive. the only other time you need to replace your main drive if it failing. you can check it health using hd tune and wd software. if your pc is from 2008 depending on the chipset on the mb if you want your pc to boot faster use a ssd as the boot drive and a standard hard drive as storage.

 

[microtechsteve]

with hard drives if yours is almost full your better off buying a bigger hard drive. the only other time you need to replace your main drive if it failing. you can check it health using hd tune and wd software. if your pc is from 2008 depending on the chipset on the mb if you want your pc to boot faster use a ssd as the boot drive and a standard hard drive as storage.

Cool! Thanks!

 

[InvalidError]

Is it worth getting one? I have a 500gb hdd

Your 500GB HDD is your boot drive.

I think you are confusing 'boot drive', HDD, SSD.

An SSD is nothing more than a different storage technology and works almost exactly the same way as an HDD as far as software is concerned. The only major differences are that SSDs are much faster and have no moving parts, which is why people prefer them as boot drives. SSDs can be used for everyday mass storage too, though this it isn't cost-effective unless you have relatively little data.