Install locations for Games...

[sitheris]

Not sure if this is the right forum but it's Disk Storage related.

Where's the best place to install things like games so you get the best performance?

On your OS partition, or on a seperate small partition?

Right now I have WoW installed on my OS partition, and HL2 installed on a seperated 25gb partition.

 

[wuggle]

As long as everything is on the same physical drive, I dont think it really matters which partition its on (as long as everything is defragged). If its on 2 seperate drives, then you might get a small performance bump, but I have no idea. I haven't seen any benchmarks comparing level loading times between games installed on the OS drive vs a different drive, so this is pure guess work.

I personally install games onto my OS partition so I don't have old installs lying around after I reformat.

 

[kent]

Install the games to a RAM drive

 

[Bullitt]

I try to place my apps on a seperate partition just because its easier to re-install my OS if kept seperate.

As for does it offer any performance increase? Marginal. The original premise was based in Win9x days where drives and proccies were slower and fragmentation really added up to performance. I placed applications on a seperate partition just so it wouldnt get as fragmented as the OS/swap/pagefile partitions.

Those days are kinda over, but it still may make an impact, although marginal.

Rule of thumb is to place your OS and apps on the fastest partitions you have, usually the first physical/logical ones. Speed of the drives is much more important nowadays.

I usually reserve a 5GB partition for OS then 50-80% for apps on a 2nd partition and remainder for a data partition. I put a fixed swapfile on the 2nd partition so it won't fragment and then install my apps.