In a 2 Hard Drive system is there a real performance boost to putting all programs on the non boot drive?

Question

Is there any benifit to placing certain types of programs to the non boot drive?

Answer 1

No real benefit. And some programs won't run properly.

Answer 2

Personally, yes I find that the improvement is worthy of dividing my essential programs from the not so essential ... all windows xp files are on my C drive which is only a 60 g so I have an external 160g that I use for most if not all of my other storage. I run a multitude of different programs this way and ALL are completely accessible and quick to respond.

You have to have either a 2.0 USB or a firewire connection however in order to get the performance for quick access...

I had this setup on my Dell Inspirion and now for my HP Pavilion...no problems with either.

In desktop systems (which we have 6) most of us have this type of situation as well...the main operating system drive and then the second drive (although some of us are greedy and have 3 extra drives)...any programs that MUST reside on C still have plenty of space for doing so but you aren't cluttering the main drive up.

I place the external drive as a short cut on my desktop along with the My Computer icon and always have quick access to either when necessary.

Answer 3

Absolutely. Keep your boot drive as free of clutter as you can and everything will run much smoother. Plus, your reboot times won't slow down.

Don't forget to do regular cleaning and defrag maintenance on both drives and it will stay as fast as the day you unpacked it.

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Answer 4

If you have two hard disks following the undermentioned guide lines
1. Create adequate number of parititions
2. Install at least two operatings systems (OS) (hence dual boot) in different partitions on the first hard disk having the root drive i.e. C: drive but donot install any of the OS in C: drive.
3. Your C: drive should be of the size of 4 GB approx and let windows installed whatever it wants in it. You should not use this partition at all for your personal purpose..
4. Create two partitions of size 3 x RAM in the second hard disk.
5. Your swap files of the OS in ist hard disk should be in these two partitions which are in the 2nd hard disk.
6. Install all programs that you want to run from these OS in the same partitions where the OS has been installed but donot save any data in these partitions.
7. Your data should be saved in another parititon call it Data partition in the 2nd hard disk (hard disc where OS is not installed).
8. Create another partition called Backup in the hard disk having hte OS partitions.
9. All your data from Data partition should be backed up in this Backup partition.
10. Create a partitoin called Spare in the 2nd hard disk for copying all temporary files and so that most of defragmentation occurs here.
11. Create another parition called Multimedia and copy your songs, videos and images there.
12. One of you OS should only have WIndows, anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall and all updates of your WIndows and defination files of all these sholud be updates.This partition is to be used for disaster recovery. In case your first OS gets infected and you cannot recover, then boot from this OS and clean the partition where infected OS resides.
13. This way, your system will also work at its peak performance.

Answer 5

It will make yoru computer faster. I don't do it that way though. If you are playing games the best way is to put all gaming software on one drive and all non-gaming software on another so that the games will run faster and the other drive will not be burdened by a thousand or so megabytes eaten up by a game.

Hope this helps - Josh

Answer 6

Yes. you are correct. I can give you a link that deals with hard drive problems. Some RAM/hard drive problems can be easily fixed yourself by using easily available tools. I found the info at http://fixit.in useful. Try this site, if you can get what is required.

Answer 7

booting up will be so much more faster
and sometimes, depending on the application, the program may just run a little faster, but not noticalby faster

Answer 8

It depends on what you are doing.

The BIGGEST boost,"SAFETY WISE", is to put the OS on one partition, BY ITSELF, and everything else you can on OTHER partitions. (SOME software INSISTS on the "C:" drive to work!)

Then, in case of a severe "crash", you can reformat and reload the OS without disturbing the rest of the system. (You then use a backup, YOU DO BACKUP YOUR SYSTEM I hope, to overwrite the OS, thereby restoring ALL your program connections to the rest of the software and hardware!!)

Answer 9

I would not recommend it! You could use your second drive for saving any and all of your files but not the programs themselves; I don't think that you would gain any benefit from what you want to do.

Answer 10

you won't notice it if for basic web browsing