Optimal way to use an SSD ?

[Ash0787]

I've been using a 512gb ssd for about 3 years now, I like the speed increase that they give for general usage, but I have found that the size gets full quite easily and sometimes it is not easy to tell why

I do have some games installed to the ssd maybe 5 ? but I forget which ones

This makes me think, say if you had a super fast drive like the intel 750,
would it be better to use it as a secondary drive and only install games to it ? that way you could easily see what is on there and keep it clean,
but the downside would be that you then cant use it as your operating system drive and therefore lose some speed of the computer in general

Any ideas ? I heard Linus ( tech tips ) mention that it is possible to move a single game folder onto the SSD in Steam when you want to play it and then swap a different one so you only have one

 

[Ash0787]

Not just games on the C drive but applications,
any data that I dont want to dissapear from mechanical hard drive failure

downloads folder is like 100GB lots of zipped files, images, youtube videos, drivers, demo programs e.g. UE4

Skyrim saves folder is 6GB, got 1000s of images on the desktop,
some videos saved in documents from when I used to edit montage type movies ( I believe it was faster to render to the ssd )

on C:/ random folders, old files that have come from other computers
like screenshots from 2005, programming code, couple of games that are not installed through steam e.g. League

Any data thats been written by programs e.g. firefox cache, history etc

 

[Ash0787]

Do you think it might be worth partitioning in future to make it so the primary
drive is relatively small which would remove the temptation to store lots of stuff on there and foster better organization ? the other half of the drive could be like page file / video editing and then use a different physical drive for games ?


What about if I download a patch or mod ? should I download it to an SSD and then unrar it there and then move it away to a mechanical drive after and delete the archive ? if its a mod then I might want it to be loaded from an SSD at runtime though