Help with Hard Drive Partitions

I recently purchased a lenovo y580. It came with a 500GB HD installed. I put in a 128GB SSD and did a fresh install of windows. I never really did anything to the partitions on the other hard drive. I left the OS that was installed on the original HD, so it is still called Windows7_OS and I use it to store all my data. The Lenovo partition has drivers and I believe it allows the "One Key Recovery" application to work, and it should not be touched.

Am I losing optimized function with the way this setup is? Is there anything I should change?

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http://i47.tinypic.com/oloxh.png

I really dont know anything about hard drives and partitioning, so any advice and direction is appreciated.

 

I don't think your 'one touch recovery' option will work anymore with a secondary drive installed.

To make it work; you will need to remove the SSD and have the HDD be the main/only boot device.

What I would do is boot from the HDD - make the DVD's it will prompt you to make (about 3 hrs to create these Recovery DVD's...) and then remove all the partitions on the HDD to use as a proper DATA drive.

Proper to me is a 100GB partition that I would put my User folder on (I call it my Work in Progress drive or WIP for short) and the remaining partition would be the Archive drive which would hold 'finished' work or media such as music/video/pdf's/etc.


Note you don't have to do the above - but you are wasting at least 10% (50GB) of the capacity of the HDD - not to mention that the data you do have on there is accessed in the slowest possible way.


You may want to note that if you installed the SSD and then installed Windows with both drives physically in the system: that 'System_DRV' D:\ may be needed to boot your system with the SSD.

In other words: if you remove the HDD (or it dies, etc...) your system may not boot at all.


The 'proper' way to go about setting up your system to ensure no surprises down the road:

Backup your current data (from the SSD and the HDD) to preferably two external drives (exact same data on both external drives - don't trust a single copy as a 'backup' - it isn't).

Physically remove the HDD and see if your system boots (I'd guess it won't). Even if it does: I would still do a full (clean) re-install on the SSD (without the HDD present/installed) and this time leave around 30% unallocated space (if you want to have the highest performance possible from your SSD).

See:
AnandTech - Exploring the Relationship Between Spare Area and Performance Consistency in Modern SSDs



With this step completed, I would remove the SSD and install the HDD and see if it boots (I would guess maybe not - because the boot information was overwritten when the SSD was installed...). If it does boot - create the Recovery DVD's and store them safely away.

Now; put in the SSD, make sure you've booted from it and go to Disk Management and remove all partitions from the HDD. Once they are removed - create a 100GB partition for your 'WIP' drive. With this partition created - make one more partition with the remainder of the capacity - this will be your 'Archive' drive.

On the WIP drive - create a folder (making sure you assign it full security access rights for your user account) and then MOVE all your user folders from the SSD to this folder. (Don't move the User folder - move the folders within your User folder...).


Now your system is setup as 'optimized' as it can get - the only other thing I would recommend now is running PerfectDisk 12.5 in Stealthmode on the HDD.


Sorry for the brief details; but I hope it gets you going in the right direction.

Good luck.