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So in a few days I'm going to be building a new PC in which I decided to icorporate an SSD (120GB) + HDD (1TB) combo. Are there any rules of thumb as to how you should divide your data among those two to allow the fastest experience?

As for my current plan, I know for sure I'm going to have the system itself installed on the SSD and some two-three games I'm currently playing which (after beating them) I'm going to move to my HDD if I suspect I may play them sometime in the future. But what else should you have on the SSD to not create unneccessary bottlenecks? Should the pagefile be on the SSD? Temporary files? Should I keep my Program Files on HDD or SSD? Or maybe just some particular programs should be installed on the SSD? Or maybe it's the best to not clog it up and have there just the system and the games I'm currently playing?

Thank you for the suggestions in advance.

Straightfw
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4 Answers4

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Here's what I did:

  • Remove all drives from the PC and connect the SSD only
  • Install Windows as normal
  • Re-connect your HDD
  • Boot into safe mode
  • Run the following commands through an administrative command prompt:
    • takeown /f "C:\Program Files" /r
    • icacls "C:\Program Files" /grant USERNAME:F /t
    • takeown /f "C:\Program Files (x86)" /r
    • icacls "C:\Program Files (x86)" /grant USERNAME:F /t

You may need to run those commands multiple times.

What those commands did was establish ownership over the two program files folders on your C:\ drive (provided you're running a 64-bit operating system) so that you can proceed to perform the next steps:

  • Copy your "Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)" folders to the root your D:\ drive
  • Run the following commands through an administrative command prompt:
    • del "C:\Program Files" /f /s /q
    • del "C:\Program Files (x86)" /f /s /q
  • A few things will fail to be deleted (I seem to recall the 'ink' folder in Microsoft Shared being a bit difficult) so you'll probably need to use task manager to kill any running instances of Explorer.exe before running the delete commands.
  • Some remnant files will remain and refuse to be deleted; by this point hopefully they will not be too closely attached, however, so you can run the following commands:
    • ren "C:\Program Files" "C:\1"
    • ren "C:\Program Files (x86)" "C:\2"
  • To rename them into things you can delete when you next boot into the operating system.

DO NOT REBOOT YET. Next up is the most important step:

  • In an administrative command prompt, run the following command:
    • mklink /j "C:\Program Files" "D:\Program Files"
    • mklink /j "C:\Program Files (x86)" "D:\Program Files (x86)"

What you just did was establish a directory symbolic link (a junction) that will effectively redirect any requests to C:\Program files to D:\Program Files (the letter path I presume your HDD is taking) on a filesystem level. This way you don't need to change any other settings. When applications install to C:\Program Files, you can let them, confident that they're actually installing to D:\ . It's all very clever.

You will also want to bookmark this link, just in case: http://www.vilkku.org/2010/02/05/how-to-fix-windows-update-error-80070011/

seagull
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I would recommend you to move the default library locations, move the pagefile, disable hibernate, change temp folder locations, and disable automatic defrag.

While you move the pagefile, you could also disable it, if you have enough RAM. I would leave a 500MB to 1GB of space for crash dump files in case your computer has a BSOD.

When it comes to storing games on the SSD, I would only put games on it that would benefit from the performance of the SSD. For example, if all you do is play COD online, I would leave that on the HDD, as most of the time you are waiting for others to load the game as well. Skyrim, on the other hand, would be great on the SSD.

More info about pagefile from LifeHacker here

Community
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Cfinley
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I am not a big pro in this, but here are my recommendations, based on my experience:

  • Your OS installation on SSD (you want faster boot time and better performance, don't you?)
  • All programs* installed on SSD (as long as the amount of disk space you use is reasonable)
  • Page file - definitely on SSD (if you use one)
  • Documents, movies, music library and User Home folders - HDD

*Note, that if you have a lot of software installed on your machine, then you might need to move some to HDD. In this case you have following factors to consider:

  1. Is software tolerant to working from non-system drive (this is important, some programs just won't run if they are not installed on C:)
  2. How often do you use software and how fast do you expect it to be (For example I would gladly move massive IDE's to HDD, because I don't mind if it takes 5 minutes to load it in the beginning of working the day, because I know it is going to stay open all day and I don't really expect it to be rapid). Same applies to massive graphical editors like Photoshop
  3. All games are definitely going to SSD (games load a lot of resources from the disk and you don't want your disk access time to be the bottleneck)
  4. All small programs I would move to SSD, because biggest problem with HDD is access time.

And even though there is no 100% right answer, I have to tell you it is a good question. And I would like to see other users share their experience

Art Gertner
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I have the same combination except hdd: ssd 120GB and hhd 500GB. I use ssd for operation system and all programs. 120GB is enough for all general programs, not games.
All media/files folders (even "My documents", "My music", "Downloads" etc.) and temp folders move to hhd.

So I have a very quick system and "fulminant" speed for lunching programs.

If you want, try google something like "configure ssd / optimaze ssd", there are a lot of advices which can help you to extend the life of your ssd.

Dominic Freeman
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