secondary hard drive for games?

[Dragonstar]

Hey all, figured I would ask here first.

In the next week or so i'm going to be upgrading to Windows 7.

My question is: Is it better to install and run your games from a secondary drive? I have heard people make comments about performance being better and was wondering what you guys thought.

[RonHiler]

Well, I dunno about performance, but I have two drives in my system just for organizational purposes.

I keep all my tools (Maya, Photoshop, compilers and such) and OS on the C drive, while all my projects and games live on the D drive. Backups of projects go on the C drive (SVN now mostly).

It just keeps things nice and clean for me. I'm kind of a stickler for clean systems

[Innocence]

Theoretically, you should get better performance, since you'll have two harddrive systems reading files simultaneously.

How noticable it will be depends on the game. After all, once the systems already loaded, chances are it wont need to do much reading from the system-drive anyway.

If you want to improve overall performance you could set the harddrives up in RAID (most computers feature on-board RAID controllers today).

Be aware that more drives means larger power-consumption - in case you care about this If you only want different drives for sakes of organization, you could simple choose to make two partitions on one harddrive (this wont help performance since there still just one harddisk).

[Pix]

For multiple drives in a non-RAID situation, you'd want to make sure (if using IDE) that the drives are ideally on separate controllers, I believe. Not sure if it matters on SATA.