Storage How to use my SSD and HDD?

I was at LiTS yesterday, and I got a very good deal on a crucial M4 64GB, and I've spent most of the day upgrading firmware, installing windows, and the such. Now, I know this may sound like a stupid question, but is it possible to have my "Program Files" folders on my HDD, as well as "Users"? I've tried just moving them straight, and they don't want to go. is there somthing I'm missing? can I only install programs to the SSD? Sorry to ask, but I'm a bit of a storage n00b.

 

No bud i don't think that is possible, as it the directory for pretty much all your software. For one i should imagine it would stop you from moving it, you would break all you links to your installations and i expect most of them would be running at the time of the 'move' and wouldn't be too happy about it.

Ive just bought that same SSD, if you need the space try shrinking the windows installation before you install it.

This is what i use, be careful not to remove too much though!

http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

 

You can do this, but only when installing the programs. Just customise the install path to be on the HDD rather than the SSD. Personally I recently got a 90GB and I leave all the OS and programs on the SSD, and my 2TB HDD is basically for Steam and video files.

 

Just keep in mind that the best benefit comes form having the Windows installation and the page file on the SSD.
So don’t push the page file on to the old drive so that you can fit more programmes on the SSD, as the overall effect will be slower.

 

It's easily possible in two ways.

Firstly there is the registry edit - which I would only do on new installs.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion then changing the directory path. Depending on which version of windows you have there will be a handful of paths to change. If you wish you can also change the common files path but that tends to cause some problems so I would leave it as it is. Just remember to move all your current program files onto the new drive.

The second and safer option is to manually select the path when installing programs.

As for users folder, you can manually change the path of documents, music etc by right clicking and going to location and setting a new path. Because the links work within a library there will not be issues of missing file locations that were prevalent in older versions of windows.

 

I found this YouTube video very useful when setting my system up...

That was after being forced to reinstall windows 7 after applying some of the registry hacks which basically utterly confused the OS.

 

To move your user folders in Windows 7, open explorer, look in the 'Libraries' tree and expand until you can see each folder (eg Libraries -> Documents > My Documents, Public Documents etc). Right click each folder you want to move, select 'Properties' and go to the 'Location' tab. You can select a new location on the HDD by clicking the 'Move' button. You can restore them to the default using this method too.

A little aside, I was cloning some disks and unplugged some of my hard drives and the drive letters got messed up, Windows did not like this and lost all the user folders when this happened so always remember to change the drive letter back to the way they were if you ever tinker with the drives.