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A three drive system - the sweet spot

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mouser:
We've talked about this before, but as I have a relatively new pc setup, I thought it was worth revisiting the idea of having multiple hard drives, for those who haven't yet caught on to the greatness of it.

This is mainly for heavy computer users -- more casual users do not need to worry about such stuff.

Three Drives are better than one:


* The first hard drive (C) on the computer should be an SSD.  These are super fast, and affordable when the sizes are small (250 gb or so).  This will be your Operating System drive and where (most of) your program files get installed.  My philosophy is that this drive is too small to hold everything, and too unreliable to hold your documents.
* The second hard drive (D) will be a giant one.  2TB at least.  (Almost) everything else goes on this drive -- including your large virtual machines, a giant directory for drive image backups, all downloads, any giant game installations, etc.  You want it large enough that you always have plenty of free space. Drive speed is usually not an issue on for this drive.
* The third hard drive (E) is for your documents and settings.  Now this might be where some people disagree with me, and only use two hard drives, and put their documents on their SECOND hard drive.  After all there should be plenty of space on the second drive.  But having a dedicated SMALLER drive for your documents has some advantages.  For example, you can backup from your documents drive to your second (big) drive, offering real redundancy to hardware failure.  The document drive is also small enough that you could RAID mirror it, and/or full drive image it frequently.
The "fourth" hard drive:

In addition to these, you will want either an external sata hard drive dock, or an internal sata drive rack that will allow you to easily attach and remove additional hard drives for the purposes of backing up to a drive you can store on the shelf.

40hz:
The first hard drive (C) on the computer should be an SSD.  These are super fast, and affordable when the sizes are small (250 gb or so).  This will be your Operating System drive and where (most of) your program files get installed.  My philosophy is that this drive is too small to hold everything, and too unreliable to hold your documents.
-mouser (March 22, 2014, 02:57 PM)
--- End quote ---

If you're running a server, make sure your temp and logfile directories are all residing on another standard drive too. I'd suspect all that constant reading and writing is probably not too healthy for an SSD. And servers generate a lot of logging and scratchpad activity.

Just my :two:  :)

Edvard:
^^ Amen.  I've heard it since SSD's came out that the swapfile (pagefile on Windows) should go on a fast but non-SSD Disk.  Hadn't thought of the temp and log files, good catch.

I've always thought separate drives were a good thing.  If I had another SATA disk, I'd do that for my current setup, but... :(

mouser:
Is there any guide somewhere on how to configure the temp and log files to put them on another drive?

Shades:
System and user specific temp folders can be configured in the advanced settings menu that is accessible through System properties.

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