So im going to upgrade my pc. Currently i have a 500gb hard drive. Now ive read in places that you can have a storage hard drive and another one for the operating system alone only? My current HD ive partitioned so 100gb for the OS and 400gb for storage. For my PC to be at maximum performance can anyone share some advice with how i should go about storage/hard drive with my new PC please ?? I thought that 1 harddrive is enough but i come across different things like have 2 hard drives. 1 as a hard drive and the other as ssd or something [some kind of acronym]. I would just like to know what thats all about or in a couple of words, would just like my PC to be running as best as possible. Thank you ............................. To summarise slightly-Instead of buying just 1 harddrive for the pc. Should i consider something else so that my PC can run better? thanks again and hope that anyone might be kind enough to impart with some great advice
Rich, there is no right or wrong answer, but I try and separate my storage requirements from my OS requirements. So, I have a small (=cheaper) hard drive for my OS and another larger drive for storage and games. Personally, I wouldn't have data on the same disk as my OS, unless I had to. The prices of storage these days means that you may have to just use one disk for the moment. Andy
Yep, I agree with the above. An SSD is a Solid State Drive (i.e. there are no moving parts). An SSD would significantly improve the OS' loading time compared to a standard drive and any programs installed on the SSD would load much faster.
Welcome. Having separate hard drives for OS and storage is always better. Even though you have partitioned the drive, it is still one single mechanical drive. As the OS is almost nearly always accessing the drive for one reason or another (especially as RAM starts to get low) then it will interfere with how fast data is transferred to and from the other partition - because it's still one drive, with one read/write head. I would have OS and Storage on 2 separate hard drives, so accessing one does not significantly slow the other. I never even partition storage devices If I need a new "drive" on my computer, I will literally fit a new physical hard drive. I currently have C: Windows. D: Storage, E: Music & Video, and I also have S: Scratch, which is a 1.5TB hard drive that serves no other purpose than to be a scratch disk for photoshop and Premiere. All separate hard drives. SSDs are solid State Drives. Essentially the spinning platter of magentic material that stores data on a mechanical drive is replaced by NAND chips... think of it as a very big, very fast flash drive. As it has no moving parts it's faster, and offers true random access, so needs no defragging (defragging can actually harm a SSD). They are however, far more expensive than a mechanical drive. Ideal: OS drive = SSD Storage = big 5400rpm mechanical.
It won't BREAK them, but it will definitely shorten it's life if you defrag like you would with a mechanical drive. Even if it wasn't detrimental to their health, it's utterly pointless, as they offer true random access anyway. There will be no performance gain.
