Soldato
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Rexeh is right, I also only have my top programs on my SSD. I like to keep it clean.
OS on SSD, Everything else on SATA - How??
- Thread starter P20
- Start date
Brilliant - thanks for that. My programs are on a separate partition and it's annoying having to change the path on every install!
Soldato
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- 29 Aug 2010
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You want to use every last bit of your SSD to make it worth the money. People were the same with Windows Vista/7's SuperFetch. Waaa it's using my RAM! The more free space you have on your SSD or RAM, the more money you're wasting!
Slightly off topic here, but this comment made me think of ReadyBoost. Is that worth using at all under any circumstances? If so, how big a USB drive would you ideally want?
Associate
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Actually you can move the location of the entire users folder by editting some stuff in the registry. I've done it on mine.
People seem to think SSDs will dissolve if you use them for their intended purpose. They fail to realise they will likely be on a whole new computer before their current SSD fails!
Some people have reported very good gains, others haven't noticed a thing. Depends on your PC really and what you do with it. I know most people tend to use 4GB+ USB drives for it.
Soldato
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Exactly, not to mention it's more likely that the controller will fail before all the NAND has used up all its write cycles. People seriously treat SSDs like they are delicate little flowers. Just use them like normal HDDs and stop doing all these stupid tricks trying to gain a little more life span. By the time SSDs currently in use fail we're likely to be getting 500GB ones for around the same price as 120GB ones now.
I keep around 5-10% of my SSD clear should I want to install something or work with big files. The ONLY reason I offload to my second drive is because the SSD isn't big enough.
I really don't understand the OS-only drive mentality, but each to their own.
I really don't understand the OS-only drive mentality, but each to their own.
Windows also doesn't like it when you have less than 5-10% free. Nothing wrong with that, but some people seem to value an empty SSD more than one that has all their stuff on it.
They might as well buy one and leave it in its bloody anti-static bag!
You can use the mlink command to have stuff on another drive but make the OS think it's still on the original. Good for things like silly Steam games that take up to much space for the benefit etc. Just cut/paste the folder to it's new location then use the command in an elevated cmd.
mklink/d "original location" "new location"
For example:
mklink/d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead 2" "D:\Program Files\Steam\left 4 dead 2"
mklink/d "original location" "new location"
For example:
mklink/d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead 2" "D:\Program Files\Steam\left 4 dead 2"
Yea it would work any way you want it, just put the original and new folders into the example above and bingo. It works like a shortcut only at the filesystem level. It's a feature of NTFS called a symbolic link.
Some folders you might want to keep the original path for convenience so as a couple of people have mentioned you might want to junction them. This is actually pretty easy to do.
Goto http://live.sysinternals.com and download the tool junction.exe (sysinternals are a microsoft owned company now, so this is now a microsoft tool)
Then if you want to redirect your downloads folder for example
1) drag the folder to the new location and move all contents
2) drop the junction.exe tool somewhere in your path (if you have no idea, just drop it into the windows folder)
3) open a command prompt punch in the following (editing paths as appropriate)
Then if you access the downloads folder in C:\Users\P20\Downloads it will actually be accessing the X:\Downloads folder, this works seemlessly
edit:
Forgot to mention if you have an SSD chances are you can afford a decent amount of ram too, a good tweak is to setup a 500mb-1gb ram disk and junction your temp folder/ie cache/firefox cache to it. That way the contents is dumped every time you reboot and you never have to clean them out.
additionally i actually used this to move my incoming files folder in utorrent to a 16gb sandisk usb stick, stops utorrent from keeping your mechanical drive spinning
Goto http://live.sysinternals.com and download the tool junction.exe (sysinternals are a microsoft owned company now, so this is now a microsoft tool)
Then if you want to redirect your downloads folder for example
1) drag the folder to the new location and move all contents
2) drop the junction.exe tool somewhere in your path (if you have no idea, just drop it into the windows folder)
3) open a command prompt punch in the following (editing paths as appropriate)
Then if you access the downloads folder in C:\Users\P20\Downloads it will actually be accessing the X:\Downloads folder, this works seemlessly
edit:
Forgot to mention if you have an SSD chances are you can afford a decent amount of ram too, a good tweak is to setup a 500mb-1gb ram disk and junction your temp folder/ie cache/firefox cache to it. That way the contents is dumped every time you reboot and you never have to clean them out.
additionally i actually used this to move my incoming files folder in utorrent to a 16gb sandisk usb stick, stops utorrent from keeping your mechanical drive spinning
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I think it does make a difference, I've asked this question before and never got a definitive answer. To be sure I always link files in the SSD to mechanical direction only.
On the subject of creating links there are a few GUI (or drag'n drop) tools around to make this job easier (e.g. Steamtool, Linkmagic).
If you want a visual interface, junction link magic works very well. Useful application when you've got 30 odd junctions going on and need to see how many you have!
http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm
http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm
Actually it's a junction if talking about directories. They're not quite the same as the symbolic links. Not that it matters - result is is the same!
/pedant
Actually they are two different things and what I gave an example of is indeed a symbolic link.
/pedant
Cool little application there, nice find!
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Anybody have a definitive answer to this? I'd prefer to have Steam installed on a larger mechanical for ease of reformatting.