Noob question: how to fully utilize the 1tb harddrive??

Hi guys, just want to ask how do i use the space in the other hard drives?
Im asking because when i install certain games such as bad company on other harddrives such as (d) It would say it is unstable and could only install under (c) drive...

Im new with computers and have never had any experience with computers that had such a huge harddrive.
Thanks in advance for any help given!

 

How is your hard drive currently partitioned?

 

I store movies, videos, music, pictures, backup programs and backup games on my second HDD.

 

It's strage to me, that a game installed on another Partitions get's instable. Usually it should not make any difference.

About partitioning every persons has it's own philosophy.

With Windows XP and in case of having one big Harddrive, i usually made 4 partitions for "System", "temp", "games", and "data" in order to advoid high fragmentation, and to get different data separated.

I went fine with that pattern for the last 3 years.

1 Terrabye? ok, then let me suggest:

c: (SYSTEM) 150 GB
d: (TEMP) 50 GB (temp-folder, caches of different programs = high fragmentary data)
e: (GAMES) (depends on, how much games and which ones) 350 GB or less
f: (DATA) the remaining ... ~ 450 GB

In case of having two Hard drives, i have no experience. I would try to put C, D and E on the first; and F (dokuments) and G (archive) on the second.

Finally it depends on your usage of your computer and which software you are using. For example if you are using much virtual machines for developement or testing, or if you have very much music files, then you need a big data partition. If you use very much games, then *that* partition must get huge.

 

Ideally I would think that it's better to install your games on the second drive. You don't want a situation where the computer is trying to access both game files, page file, and os files at the same time on the same drive.

Personally this is what I did. I kept the default setup on the main drive. OS 120 GB and the other partition I use for utilities and apps, as well as backup.

The other hardrive I repartitioned to 1 big drive which I installed all my games on. Where possible I also moved the save game folder to this drive as well.

The end result is that on games that access the HDD a lot (like Oblivion, or LOTRO) the HDD with the games doesn't have to compete with accessing anything else.

 

I'm wondering why the program even said that the second hard drive was unstable. That should not happen . Did you format this second drive? Or was it already in your system.
I would have someone close to you that knows what and how this works to check it as you stated that you are not up to speed on what is going on.
The only time I have had something like this happen is when a drive was faulty.

 

Hi guys, thanks for the response.
I have a total of four drives right now
(c) (d) (e) (f)
and only know that c drive is for the OS

it came like that when o first opened the laptop

i have no clue on how to seperate the drives or merge them together. So far everything i install or downlpad goes into my (c) drive.
I would like to seperate the games and the os like many of you suggested but dont really know how to. If ir says ita unstable should i just ignore the warning message? Thanks for all who responded!

 

I've got a 60 gig SSD for the OS and a 1TB HDD (unpartitioned) for all my other stuff such as documents, media, games, programs etc.
You can easily set up a redirection for personal folders in Windows 7, so that by default your 'Documents' folder is in 'D:\My Documents' rather than 'C:\Users\[your name]\Documents'. I did this to Documents, Music, Videos and Pictures. Redirecting the whole 'Users' folder is a bit more hassle, because it can only be done through the registry - not worth the hassle in my opinion.

I prefer to keep the OS and files on different hard drives, because it minimizes the risk of data loss - should the OS fail I have all my stuff on a separate drive, which can be taken out and 'read' on a different machine.

As far as I know partitioning makes very little difference in terms of hard drive perfromance. It also doesn't provide any protection against mechanical HDD failures - because it's the whole hard drive failing and not just a particular partition.

As for game and program instability - I doubt it's related to using a drive other than C for installations. In the end, if I was to now remove my SSD with Windows and replace it with a larger SSD, all the stuff on the HDD would still work, because a majority of progs / games would be happy to recreate all the registry entries. Sure, there could be issues with shortcuts but hey - it would save me half a week of reinstalling all soft.

 

_: Recovery: 20GB
C: OS - 200GB
D: Docs and Downloads - 245GB
M: Music - 100GB
T: TV and Vids - 366GB