SSD with HHD

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its4thecolony

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Mar 27, 2010
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Hey guys, so I'm in the midst of building a new PC and I have a 64gb Kingston SSD which I plan on installing my win7 and key software to. Also I have a 640 GB WD Black HD that I plan on using for my storage. My question is since I play a lot of games, can I install them on my HDD and still play them because I don't want to install and uninstall each game I play. In general, can I run software that is installed on the HDD and not on the SSD.

Also I have another HDD with windows Vista from my old computer. I want to be able to boot rather than my SSD to switch Operating systems. How do I go about doing that?
 
Sure you can, just install to your HDD instead. You can even install everything to a server share and have no local disks at all; but that's all advanced stuff.

About your multi-boot; so you have three drives:
1) SSD
2) 640GB gaming HDD
3) HDD with Vista

If you would select the boot menu (F10 or F12) you should be able to boot from the Vista HDD once, without actually going inside the BIOS. If you need to do this alot, you may want to install GAG bootloader (.iso) to the primary boot drive.
 
I'm not sure; anything specific you're worried about?

Easiest setup is to install an OS to one HDD or SSD; so HDD1 gets Vista and HDD2 gets Win7; for example.

Then use any boot loader to get a menu which of the two to boot; such as GAG. Most allow you to set a default OS to load with a timeout in seconds; like no key pressed for 5 seconds would boot Vista by default. GAG can be downloaded and is open-source. Only install it after you installed both/all operating systems.
 
its4thecolony said:
Hey guys, so I'm in the midst of building a new PC and I have a 64gb Kingston SSD which I plan on installing my win7 and key software to. Also I have a 640 GB WD Black HD that I plan on using for my storage. My question is since I play a lot of games, can I install them on my HDD and still play them because I don't want to install and uninstall each game I play. In general, can I run software that is installed on the HDD and not on the SSD.

Also I have another HDD with windows Vista from my old computer. I want to be able to boot rather than my SSD to switch Operating systems. How do I go about doing that?
Click to expand...

This is exactly what I've done for about 15 years. Because of they're large and variable size footprint I've always installed games on my "data" drive/partition.

When you're installing just override the install location to D:\games\ or whatever instead of C:\Program Files\.

If your question was concerning doing your upgrade without reinstalling any of the games, that's another matter entirely. This is more to do with symbolic links and NTFS junction points. This is also the case if you want to set up a system where you have lots of games installed but the one or two that you're currently playing actually reside on the SSD and you want to rotate in and out. (I've been thinking about doing something like this for a while since before the thread on that topic started here but I have never got around to bothering).
 
Surly73 said:
This is exactly what I've done for about 15 years. Because of they're large and variable size footprint I've always installed games on my "data" drive/partition.

When you're installing just override the install location to D:\games\ or whatever instead of C:\Program Files\.

If your question was concerning doing your upgrade without reinstalling any of the games, that's another matter entirely. This is more to do with symbolic links and NTFS junction points. This is also the case if you want to set up a system where you have lots of games installed but the one or two that you're currently playing actually reside on the SSD and you want to rotate in and out. (I've been thinking about doing something like this for a while since before the thread on that topic started here but I have never got around to bothering).
Click to expand...

That what im thinking about doing, just installing the game and rotating the folder. But is there a way where I don't need to rotate the game folder from HHD to SSD. So basicly I can just run the game straight from the HDD even though the OS is installed on the SSD

Also yeah on my old pc I use to have 2 hard drives, each with a different OS and every time I would turn on the games I would press F10 for the boot setup but after a while of doing that, my computer died on me.
 
its4thecolony said:
That what im thinking about doing, just installing the game and rotating the folder. But is there a way where I don't need to rotate the game folder from HHD to SSD. So basicly I can just run the game straight from the HDD even though the OS is installed on the SSD.
Click to expand...

yes, this is really easy to do. just have one hard drive or partition set up for operating system #1 (the C:\ drive), then another hard drive or partition set up for OS #2 (the D:\ drive). let's say you want to install both WinVista & Win7.....so you'd install Vista on C: and Win7 on D: (or the other way around, it doesn't really matter).

then you'd want to set up an entirely different hard drive/partition for all your installed programs & storage (the E:\ drive).

in your case, i'd install whichever OS you'll be using most frequently on the SSD as the C:\ drive, use your existing hard drive (the one that currently has Vista on it) for the secondary OS as the D:\ drive, then use the 640GB drive as the E:\ drive for storage & all your installed programs (shared between the 2 OS'es).

so once you install both OS'es to their respective drive/partition, it's time to start installing your programs.

during the installation of almost every Windows-based program, you have the option of selecting where you want to install the program. by default, it will likely be set to C:\Program Files....don't use that, change it to a folder on (in the example above) the E:\ drive, such as E:\Program Files....it will then install all the files that the program needs to run in that folder on the E:\ drive, and the only thing that will go on the drive that the OS is located on is the registry settings for that program, and in some cases, a "temp" folder for that program.

in some cases, you can use the same installation directory for both operating systems, if the two OS'es are similar enough to each other (such as vista & 7), but you could also set up a separate "Program Files" folder for each OS to keep them separate if you want.....such as install all the programs for Win7 to E:\Win7\Program Files, and install all the programs for WinVista to E:\Vista\Program Files.

and for whatever programs you will be using most often, you can install them to a separate partition on the SSD drive to help with load times.

once this is all done, the programs will automatically run from whichever drive/partition you chose to install it to, regardless of which drive/partition you installed the OS on.
 
its4thecolony said:
That what im thinking about doing, just installing the game and rotating the folder. But is there a way where I don't need to rotate the game folder from HHD to SSD. So basicly I can just run the game straight from the HDD even though the OS is installed on the SSD

Also yeah on my old pc I use to have 2 hard drives, each with a different OS and every time I would turn on the games I would press F10 for the boot setup but after a while of doing that, my computer died on me.
Click to expand...

Not rotating is the easy way. Just tell the game to install on D: (or whatever the HDD is on your system). My steam folder is D:\games-W7\Steam\, for instance. It always has been, even when C: and D: were just partitions on the same HDD. Now C: is SSD (from Win7's view) and D: is still the HDD. I still have Vista and XP installed on the HDD too, but that's beyond the scope of this thread.

The rotating is more complicated but allows you to actually store the files for your active games on the SSD while keeping all of the rest on HDD. You can "fool" the system either way - 1/ make it think all games are installed on C: but most reside on D: 2/ make it think all games are installed on D: but some are actually on C: with links left behind on D:.

I'd be doing scenario #2, if anything at all.
 
haha, thank for all the info guys. I'm not just waiting for my video card so I can finally start up my PC
 
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