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Setting up a secondary drive

T

Turbosound

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 10, 2011
Messages
178
In most cases do people set up a secondary drive by assigning it a letter or by mounting it in an empty NTFS folder?
 
Generally as an additional drive letter. Junction points/Symbolic links can be used to mount a drive/filesystem to a mount point in a folder if you wish, but it is generally easier to just use a drive letter.
 
Alright I will choose the drive letter option. A few last questions with having a secondary drive, if I were to keep my pictures, music and mkv files on the secondary drive, and go to start menu, pictures or music or videos would they be there? Also, if I installed a game on the secondary drive would it appear in start menu, games? When installing a game or a program to a secondary drive will ANYTHING be installed/copied to the C drive?

Thanks
 
If you go to Start > Documents the pictures and documents folders you would see are in \Users\$Username\My Documents etc. You can manually put other folders in there is you wish. As to installed apps, as long as it is a recent app and they used a decent installer app, the programs in your Start menu will show up regardless of where you chose to install them. As to your last question, it is completely dependent on the program. While you may install the program to the D drive, it still may keep internal data on \users\$username\local and roaming (among other places).
 
Got it! Based on your reply I would perfer to intall apps/games on the boot/OS dirve, this way I know for sure that everything is on the one drive. I also would perfer to keep my documents, pictures and music file on the boot/OS drive so they appear in the default folders. I will use the 3TB secondary drive for just my MKV files. By the way, when using a internal hard drive for a secondary drive, do I have to adjust jumper pins or something or just put the drive in the bay, format and then I'm ready to go? Thanks
 
If you have the space, it is easiest to install everything to your boot volume. If you have 2 drives (and your board supports booting from the drive based on size) I would make the newer, bigger drive the boot volume (as it is likely faster than the older, smaller one)
 
huh. I have one 1tb caviar black and one 3tb caviar green. I thought I couldnt make the 3tb a bootable drive because of the size. anyway do I need to adjust jumper pins or something on the secondary drive itself
 
I don't know what board you have, (you didn't say anything about which board you have in this thread) so that is why I said above "If you board supports booting from the drive based on size". If you have a UEFI based board then that is what I would do. If you don't, then you can't do what I suggested and will have to stay with the way you have it now.
 
Don't use a caviar green as a boot drive.

Jumpers are pretty much gone from modern computing, and certainly not needed in your case.
 
I have a nforce 650 sli chipset and that is all I will ever know. The board itself doesnt specify what it is, just says Dell. I thought a chipset is a motherboard and vise versa. Being that the board/chipset is almost 5 years old, theres a slim chance that it supports UEFI.

I originally purchased a pair of 2TB caviar blacks and was told by WD that having the pair configured in RAID 0 as a boot drive, (total of 4TB) would work fine in MBR. It showed up fine in the RAID BIOS but when I installed windows 7, the C drive only showed up around 2TB, (I don't remember the exact number.) However, I never installed all the updates, including SP1 and that is why I asked if I did install the updates would the C drive show up as 4TB, (or what ever the correct number would be.)

I didn't want to keep the pair of 2TB caviar blacks even for boot and secondary drives because one wouldn't be large enough for 100 mkv titles and the other one would be overkill for my OS, games/apps, pictures and music (boot drive.)

So I returned the 2TB blacks and bought one 1TB caviar black for my boot drive and one 3TB caviar green for my secondary drive (MKV's.)

Bottom line I need around 4TB of space, around 3TB for my MKV's and around 500GB-1TB for everything else, (OS, games/apps, pictures, music and documents.) If I cant create a 4TB bootable drive in RAID 0 on my PC, and must use a boot and secondary drive, I want all my MKVs on just one drive. I wouldn't want to keep some on one and some on the other, thats just me.

So now do you think using a 1TB boot drive and a 3TB drive for my mkvs is my best option, or am I missing something?

Thank you very much.
 
It's not that it is your best option, it is your only option. Your board DOES NOT support UEFI. You have to use the 1TB as your boot/OS drive and the 3TB as your data/extra drive. As to seeing the 4TB volume in the RAID BIOS, that is because physically your board/controller supported it as a volume, but Windows does not support booting from a volume greater than 2.19TB on that board.
 
Got it. I wish I had talked to you when I first decided to get new hard drives, but its resolved now. Just to confirm, if I had installed the windows updates, with the pair of 2TB, would it have made a difference? The reason I ask it because my 3TD drive didn't show up right until I installed the windows updates.
 
It would have made no difference. Not having SP1 installed is what caused the problem with your 3TB drive being properly recognized. Nothing would have made a difference with booting Windows from a volume greater than 2.19TB with your board and the onboard SATA.
 
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