Originally posted by: conlan
Then use Acronis True Image on a regular basis to create images of your C: drive onto your D: drive. Very, very handy.
Thanks, what would be the benifit?
The reason that others do this - and the reason that I am going to do it very soon - is that if you somehow FUBAR your OS, you can reload in short order from the image and be left with a fully working OS with drivers and programs already "installed." Not absolutely necessary as such, but a big time saver if you need it.
So, if i create a 20-30Gb partition for the OS, would you install your most used programs (games) there? or on the larger partition.
We're trying to find a way to cut down on load times for games, so i would think you'd want the most used programs (games) on the smaller partition w/ the OS, correct?
I always put the OS and programs on one partition, and data on the other. The most commonly stated reason for putting
programs on another partition is that they would not be affected by a reinstall of the OS. Unfortunately, programs tie in so much with the registry that I can't imagine very many programs that would continue working without major hassles and/or reinstallation after the fresh OS install anyway.
Putting the OS and programs on separate
drives for performance reasons may have a small degree of merit in theory, but in practice I would suspect that one would see zero benefit to that procedure. In real world usage, if you don't have enough RAM to cache the majority of the files that your OS needs to run, then you need more RAM,
not another hard disk. Hence, with enough RAM, your OS won't suddenly decide that it needs something from the disk while your programs are busy accessing the disk already.