Gaming w/ second hdd

I have two hard drives in my desktop: a smaller one that the OS runs on, and a slightly larger one that i periodically backup data to. would re/installing games on the backup hdd give enough of a performance increase to be worth the trouble?

only if the second hard drive is faster.

if it’s slower, then it’s actually a detriment.

For example, if you have a 10,000 RPM drive for C:, and a 7200RPM drive for D:, games loaded from the 10,000 RPM drive will load faster.

they are both 7200RPM.

i’m just curious if it would improve performance as far as read/write is concerned.

It can help to have the OS & swap file on one drive and the game on another; but in my experience, if both HDDs are equally speedy, it’s not enough of a difference to be worth the hassle.

ah, i won’t worry about it then. thanks guys.

You won’t notice a difference in performance.

However, installing all your games to D:\Games\ or similar may help you better maintain your games library.

That’s the reason I use a second drive. It’s particularly useful for Steam, since none* of those games require a reinstall after an OS format/install on the C: drive.

*None except the few who have tossed SecurROM on top of the integrated Steam DRM.

Me too.

Although, I have WOW on my C:\ because the 10k RPM drive gets me to Orgrimmar 30 seconds faster.

It’s a 30 second deal to move your swap file to the second drive, away from where your games are. And yes, you will see a difference in load times and texture caching.

my computer -> properties -> advanced -> virtual memory

Set C: to zero. Other drive to windows managed size (or double your ram if you want to manually set it.)

Reboot.

Aszurom, does this only help if the swap file is on a different drive than your game installs, or just a different drive than the OS?