2 hard drive question....

[dmeehanss]

Hey, Im having a friend build a computer for me since im no techincal genius with computers. I know some though and i know the parts hes putting in the computer are good and all, i just have 1 question...the computer is mainly for gaming...

AMD phenom 2 x4 955 3.2ghz processor
ASUS M4A77TD Pro motherboard
Radeon HD 5870 1gb video card
Antec truepower 750w power supply
4gb (2x2gb) ddr3 sdram
corsair extreme 64gb ssd hard drive

Hes also going to put in my hard drive from my computer now which is a 160gb samsung sp1614c. He tells me to use the old samsung for music, movies and documents and the new corsair extreme for windows and programs such as games.

My question is...could i install games that already run and load fast on my computer now (such as counter strike or guild wars) on my old hard drive while keeping high end games (such as crysis or gta4) on the new corsair? I would like to save space on the 64gb drive since i dont know how many high end games i will be playing. Is it possible to do this and would it cause any compatability problems? I originally wanted a 128gb hard drive, but due to a money limit i had to cut back somewhere and the most reasonable place to cut back was the hard drive space...

 

[Trotter]

Yes, you can... as long as the game gives you the option to choose its installation destination. Most games and programs allow you to choose which drive it will be installed on. if it does, just direct it to the D: drive (if that is what the 160GB drive will be named).

When possible, I prefer to install my OS on one drive, my programs on another, and my data on a larger drive all its own.

If you plan on keeping multimedia on your computer (music/movies), 160GB will fill up fast.

 

[dmeehanss]

well i only have about 6gb worth of music/movies/word documents. So i guess ill keep my low end games on the 160 and high end on the 64. thanks for the answer....btw...can you choose what drive to download games to that are downloaded from steam? can you pick and choose?

 

[GuitarFreak]

Whatever directory you install steam to, that's where it will install the games. There isn't an option when downloading a game in steam to install it anywhere else.

 

[dmeehanss]

One more question...

If I install the copy of windows 7 im getting (its a legit version, not a bootleg) to my older 160gb hard drive, will windows or anything else run slower or load slower than if i were to put it on the new 64gb hard drive? Is it possible to run games that are saved on the new 64gb while windows is installed to the old 160gb?
Same with games...if they are installed onto the old hard drive, will they run/load slower than if on the new hard drive? Or is it the processor that determines load times and game speed?

 

[Luke]

that ssd is faster then your old hard drive. So anything installed on it will load faster then on the old hdd. Including the os. The drive you install the os on will be your c drive, if you install a game on the other drive *which ever that one is,) they can be loaded still fine. It doesn't matter if you install games on a different drive then the os, it doesn't matter. Although, if you install the os on the ssd, there goes about 10gb right there, so you might want to install it on the 160gb if you dont mind a bit of a slower boot up. If your not like really crazy about a few seconds off load times and a bit of a faster boot then perhaps you should just get a 500 or 640 gb hard drive instead, cheaper, and a larger capacity by far. Although ssd's are very nice, so it is your decision. Although that will only give you about 320 gb of space. That will fill up fast. I have an entire 500gb drive 300gb full of games alone. If you do any downloading of videos, shows, ect you are going to run out of room very fast, in the last 3 months with just normal downloading i have near filled a tb drive.