OS and games on different drives

Magic Man · 11 Aug 2007 at 15:07

Got 2 drives.

Both drives have a paging file set.

Is there any advantage to be had from installing the games on the other drive to the OS? I.e. When running a game, will the system be accessing any other files apart from those in the game directory, e.g. windows .dll's, graphic card .dll's etc that would mean that by putting the games on the second drive there wouldn't be any potential drive contention issues anymore?

I'm thinking for games where disk access is quite constant, e.g. flight simulator loading scenery etc.

Ta.

Magic Man · 11 Aug 2007 at 22:54

anyone?

yantorsen · 12 Aug 2007 at 00:01

nt sure but i have my games and os in different partitions, not for performance though just because it makes it easier to organize.

TheVoice · 12 Aug 2007 at 00:13

I personally keep my games installed to a different partition on the same drive as Windows. Done this for years now, basically to reduce the effects of fragmentation (installing games etc won't effect the OS), and so that I don't have to reinstall the games if I re-install Windows. Works well.

Digital · 12 Aug 2007 at 11:52

TheVoice said:
I don't have to reinstall the games if I re-install Windows. Works well.

What about all the registry entries?

mark_t50 · 12 Aug 2007 at 12:06

I've done a bit of configuring like this myself and found it didn't make much noticable difference that I could tell.

I have 4 x SATA drives in my system configured in 2 x RAID 0 sets. I've tried various things such as: OS, Games and Pagefile running from same drive, OS on one drive and Games on other drive, etc.

I personally stayed with the following: OS and games on first drive, pagefile + datastore on second drive. But mine gets a bit more complicated because I dual boot, so I actually have Vista + games on one drive with it's pagefile on the other, or I boot into into XP + games which is on the other drive and is configured with it's pagefile on the Vista drive. Basically, I found the best thing for me was to have the pagefile on a different drive from the OS.

stickroad · 12 Aug 2007 at 12:16

Hey mark_t50, how do you set up a Page File on a non O/S drive/partion?

Thanks.

Memphis · 12 Aug 2007 at 12:17

Digital said:
What about all the registry entries?

Quite a number of games these days will quite happily run without actually being "installed".

TheVoice · 12 Aug 2007 at 12:19

Digital said:
What about all the registry entries?

Most games seem not to have any, or at least none which they rely on explicitly. The only thing they tend to use it for is uninstalling, which is accomplished easily by just deleting the game's installation folder anyway.

Only game I have had a problem with is Hitman Blood Money. Had to re-install that because a certain file wasn't present or something, but the actual re-installation took 20 seconds because the vast majority of the files were still present on the drive, so it didn't have to copy them from the DVD. Still far quicker than re-installing from scratch.

mark_t50 · 12 Aug 2007 at 12:29

stickroad said:
Hey mark_t50, how do you set up a Page File on a non O/S drive/partion?

Thanks.

On Vista I did the following:

Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced system settings -> advanced 'tab' -> performance 'settings' button -> advanced 'tab' -> Virtual memory 'change' button.

In there I just told it that I want no pagefile on my 'c:' drive (which is vista) and set a system managed pagefile on my 'D:' drive.

It's a similar process to do in XP, just the options might be located a little differently.

stickroad · 12 Aug 2007 at 12:32

mark_t50 said:
On Vista I did the following:

Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced system settings -> advanced 'tab' -> performance 'settings' button -> advanced 'tab' -> Virtual memory 'change' button.

In there I just told it that I want no pagefile on my 'c:' drive (which is vista) and set a system managed pagefile on my 'D:' drive.

It's a similar process to do in XP, just the options might be located a little differently.

Ok thanks mark_t50, do you do a custom size or system managed size?

Thanks again.

bledd · 12 Aug 2007 at 13:22

mark_t50 said:
I've done a bit of configuring like this myself and found it didn't make much noticable difference that I could tell.

I have 4 x SATA drives in my system configured in 2 x RAID 0 sets. I've tried various things such as: OS, Games and Pagefile running from same drive, OS on one drive and Games on other drive, etc.

I personally stayed with the following: OS and games on first drive, pagefile + datastore on second drive. But mine gets a bit more complicated because I dual boot, so I actually have Vista + games on one drive with it's pagefile on the other, or I boot into into XP + games which is on the other drive and is configured with it's pagefile on the Vista drive. Basically, I found the best thing for me was to have the pagefile on a different drive from the OS.

you'd be much better off setting it as a 4x drive raid 0 setup, and making two partitions..

just don't keep any important info on there