What is the best method for storing if you have both an SSD and a HDD?

phillo74

Hey, I'll be buying both a 60GB SSD and a 1TB HDD.

...Why?

Coz I'm new to PC gaming and I was advised by a lot of people to do so....

Aside from that, I don't have a clue why! I'm just following the sheep here.

Anyways, would this be enough storage for gaming? (I don't plan on doing a helluva lot of other stuff on my rig.....as of yet.) If so, how exactly should I go about using it/dividing it out or whatever??

I'm a dummy when it comes to this stuff, so please use lamen terms.

Thanks

ShadowHearth

right, SSD will be your main drive on which you will have your OS, main programs, then you will have all your stuff like games, movies, music, photos on 1TB HDD.

SSD is small, but very fast, so to make windows and your main programs faster you better store it on SSD.

HHD is big, but slow, so you use it as storage and for all your main big applications.

phillo74

ShadowHearth wrote: »

right, SSD will be your main drive on which you will have your OS, main programs, then you will have all your stuff like games, movies, music, photos on 1TB HDD.

SSD is small, but very fast, so to make windows and your main programs faster you better store it on SSD.

HHD is big, but slow, so you use it as storage and for all your main big applications.

Spot on!!! thats all i wanted to know. One last thing though...do u think that'd b enough space (1tb & 60gb)? Also, could u define 'main programs'...just so i know for again.

ShadowHearth

I have 64gb ssd and 500gb

I have wondows, browsers, media players and BF3 on my ssd as those are most often used so they benefit most frOm fast loadings. It takes wondows to boot less then a minute from ssd, where it will be few minutes to boot from ssd.
I have all my movies, music and games/steam on hdd.

500gb is more then enough for me, I still got 200gb free on it. 1tb will be more then enough, unless you plan to have a huge porn library!

phillo74

ShadowHearth wrote: »

I have 64gb ssd and 500gb

I have wondows, browsers, media players and BF3 on my ssd as those are most often used so they benefit most frOm fast loadings. It takes wondows to boot less then a minute from ssd, where it will be few minutes to boot from ssd.
I have all my movies, music and games/steam on hdd.

500gb is more then enough for me, I still got 200gb free on it. 1tb will be more then enough, unless you plan to have a huge porn library!

Nope, red tube has it all for me! haha Nice one dude! Problem solved!

uncle_sam_ie

I have a 120GB SSD for OS, programs and a few games. I also have an older 60GB SSD that I use for overflow games using the steam mover tool. Lastly, I have a 2TB harddrive for iTunes music and movies which I streamed onto a 42" plasma through an Apple TV.

Serephucus

The others nailed it pretty well. You use your SSD for your OS, and your most frequently used programs (or all of them, depending on how many you have), and if you have space left, you can dump a game or two on it using the Steam Mover tool (Google).

You'll want to remember to disable hibernation, system restore, and shrink your pagefile down to 16MB, then restart and disable it. Those will gain you another 15GB easily.

I'm still at a loss as to how people can survive on 500GB drives. I'm on 128GB+1TB+2TB, and I'm extremely tight on space (and have been for months).

Dingatron

I've a M4 64GB SSD on the way also and I'm wondering about the pagefile. I've heard some say it's better to move it to a separate partition on the HDD or not have one at all if you've a good bit of memory. From experience whats the best option?

Serephucus

Well I'd originally read that it was better to move it to a secondary drive, but that doesn't seem like a great idea to me. If you've got 95% of your OS stuff on this super-fast drive, what happens when your system needs to fetch the last bit of data from a mechanical drive? Things slow right down.

With this in mind, when I got my first SSD, I disabled the pagefile - with the intention of enabling it on a secondary drive afterwards - but I figured I'd leave it disabled and just see what happened. People said there would be problems, etc. and to this day (two years on) I haven't re-enabled it.

Make sure though that if you're going to disable your pagefile that you set it to 16MB minimum and maximum first, then restart and disable. Otherwise Windows will just deactivate it, and you won't be able to get the 8GB or whatever it is back to actually use.

marco_polo

Serephucus wrote: »

Well I'd originally read that it was better to move it to a secondary drive, but that doesn't seem like a great idea to me. If you've got 95% of your OS stuff on this super-fast drive, what happens when your system needs to fetch the last bit of data from a mechanical drive? Things slow right down.

With this in mind, when I got my first SSD, I disabled the pagefile - with the intention of enabling it on a secondary drive afterwards - but I figured I'd leave it disabled and just see what happened. People said there would be problems, etc. and to this day (two years on) I haven't re-enabled it.

Make sure though that if you're going to disable your pagefile that you set it to 16MB minimum and maximum first, then restart and disable. Otherwise Windows will just deactivate it, and you won't be able to get the 8GB or whatever it is back to actually use.

I'd leave one enabled unless I had about 6-8Gb as with 4GB I occasionally would get virtual memory errors with no pagefile enabled, as it is possible to reach the commit limit without all physical memory actually being used. Usually if I had a good few things running and started up a memory heavy game like a modded Skyrim etc.

With 4GB and under extra 1-2Gb of pagefile backed memory where programs can reserve memory that they might never actually use makes all the difference to the memory manager.

With 6GB+ it probably doesn't matter one bit if anyone has a pagefile or what drive it is on as it is located on as it will be so rarely used anyway. I have a 2GB PF on my SSD because I do occasionally push pretty close to the limit and I want good performance if it is needed.

Come to think of it I actually don't know why I haven't just bought another 4GB as its so cheap. :pac:

Serephucus

Oh, I should have mentioned this in my earliest post, but my decision also had to do with how Vista and Win7 allocate memory. I don't know the specifics, but as far as I can remember, XP used a pagefile like you'd expect; you run out of RAM, it starts using HDD space. Win7 and Vista however always writes bits to the pagefile, no matter how much memory you're using.

As I say, I don't know any more than that (haven't looked into in since Win7 came out) but that was the main reason I left pagefile off.

marco_polo

Serephucus wrote: »

Oh, I should have mentioned this in my earliest post, but my decision also had to do with how Vista and Win7 allocate memory. I don't know the specifics, but as far as I can remember, XP used a pagefile like you'd expect; you run out of RAM, it starts using HDD space. Win7 and Vista however always writes bits to the pagefile, no matter how much memory you're using.

As I say, I don't know any more than that (haven't looked into in since Win7 came out) but that was the main reason I left pagefile off.

If you have a pagefile enabled then Window 7 will swap (recently) inactive pages from the modified list out to the pagefile regardless of how much RAM you have free.

The modified list are the memory page that have changed but have not been saved back to disk yet (an edited text file for example). The reason Windows does this is because without a pagefile, the physical memory occupied by any modified pages cannot be made available for use by other processes until the changes have been saved back to disk.

For example say you edit a word document, and minimise it for a few hours without saving it, with a pagefile enabled windows can swap the modified pages out to the pagefile and free up the physical memory for use again,
otherwise all modified memory pages belonging to the edited file must remain in physical RAM (they won't even even be discarded in a critical low memory situation),

The modified list is almost always of a very minimal size (< 50MB) so this is not really a big deal for people who roll without a pagefile.

Tea_Bag

or... just leave it on the SSD?
I set SATA to AHCI in BIOS, unplug any extra SSD and HDDs, install windows as normal, and disable hiberfile.sys

that's it.

Serephucus

You probably could now without too many problems. The reason this was done in the first place was back with older SSDs and trying to limit writes, etc.

Thanks for that marco polo. Wasn't sure on specifics, and that was nice and to-the-point.

Dingatron

Thanks guys some good information there!

dan_ep82

Mine works out at just over 10gb fully installed.

Once I got my SSD I'll never be without one again,the way I have it is
SSD - Win7/BF3/Origin/Adobe/Word/chrome
500GB 7200rpm - Program files/documents/pictures etc
1TB green - All my install files for my programs,downloaded games back up in case of system failure,basically all back ups

Osmosae

How on earth did u manage to squeeze win 7, bf3, origin, adobe (? adobe have alot of programs), word and chrome onto just 10gb ?

Serephucus

I think he means that he has just over 10GB left.

Osmosae

heh that'd make much more sense

dan_ep82

LOL,I had wrote it then edited before I posted,Win7 is 10gb