New rig - HD questions
By
je_saist,
Posted on: 2009-12-28 13:08 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
Quote:
The ability to split the OS and User data has been part of most Unix and Unix like systems, such as OSX and Linux for years. It's very easy with a modern Linux distribution to put your /home entry on a completely different hard-drive separate from your /root entry. Some Linux's, such as Mepis, put the /home entry on a separately formatted partition by default, so if you run out of room, it's Easy to go in and modify /etc/fstab at a later date to point to a new hard-drive. |
Originally Posted by Lohenien
I'm planning to pick up two HDs (not sure which size to get yet) but I'm not sure how to best utilize them. I plan to run windows on one and everything else on the other. Is that a good plan or should I be putting my games on the OS HD too ?
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Once you leave the *nix realm though, things change. Microsoft still puts all of their information on one single partition by default, and while you can place user data on a separate hard-drive or partition, you do have to take an active role in doing so. Every time you install a program or application, you'll have to make sure you do the Custom install and assign your installation to the second drive or partition.
Some vendors, such as Acer, tend to ship Windows notebooks with both an OS partition and a Data partition, and in my experience, this often confuses most users since the hard-drive or partition split isn't hidden, and isn't automatic at the OS level.
There's also the additional complex problem that the DRM (Digital Rights reMoval) that ships with many current Windows Games don't play well with non-default installations. If you use a digital download system like Steam or Direct2Drive, you can also run into issues if you aren't using the stock drive lettering and partition path.
So... good idea... but... it's really not worth the trouble if you are intending to run a Microsoft Operating System.
If you want to get a speed improvement out of having two harddisks, run them as a striped array ("RAID 0" in most motherboards, "DriveXpert SuperSpeed" in some Asus motherboards). Both harddisks will show up as a single physical drive, and half the data for any given file will be written to each disk, which in theory gives you much faster transfer rates.
I'm more about data security, though, so I use my 2nd drive for document and other data backups.
You can use the builtin disk management options in XP to mount the second harddisk as an NTFS folder of the first disk; so you can mount the second harddisk as C:\Documents and Settings\Username and then create the Username user, and all of the user Documents and Settings stuff will end up in the second disk. The trick is that to link a folder in that way, it has to be already empty, and Program Files isn't.
An alternative would be to copy the existing Program Files folder in the first hard disk to the second harddisk while it's still smallish (right after installing Windows) and then changing the Shell registry keys to point the Program Files location to the second harddisk. While the programs that were already installed with Windows would have a mix of hardcoded paths to C:\Program Files and "proper" Shell links to the new location (thus requiring two copies of those files, because even if you replace all the references in the registry, INI files and other annoying bits may still point to the old location), all NEW programs would install to D: and create any hard references to program files in D:, because that becomes the new "default" location.
When there's a will, there's a way, it's just that the way can get a little messy.
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Scratch Steam from that list; you can copy the Steam folder to any partition/folder and it will work. During the last Windows reinstall, I saved my Steam folder from Program Files and started it from C:\Games\Steam; I have run into exactly zero issues. May need to clear its registry entries and let it recreate them if you're moving the folder without reinstalling Windows.
| If you use a digital download system like Steam or Direct2Drive, you can also run into issues if you aren't using the stock drive lettering and partition path. |
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I'm planning to pick up two HDs (not sure which size to get yet) but I'm not sure how to best utilize them. I plan to run windows on one and everything else on the other. Is that a good plan or should I be putting my games on the OS HD too ?
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