SSD hard drive 120 GB, windows 7 x64 and 1 TB regular SATA drive,advice on where to store program fi

[delta007bhd]

Hello all,

First of all, sorry for writing so much but I want to be as clear and correct as possible to avoid you guys having to ask more info each time because I'm not clear enough.

I bought a 120 GB SSD drive which is not installed yet and my pc currently has 2 regular hard drives of 1 TB each. I am running windows 7 x64 ultimateand I would like to restore an image file onto the SSD so that I do not need to do a clean install and reinstall all my programs and games.

However you can already guess my current C drive contents do not fit on theSSD. The largest folders on my C are:
- GAMES: about 100 GB
- Program files: 3 GB
- Program files (x86): 4 GB
- ProgramData: 7 GB
- Users: 175 GB (of which My documents, pictures, music, videos are 150 GB)
- Windows: 22 GB
TOTAL: 290 GB plus some smaller folders of 2 GB so 292 GB total.
When I right-click C drive - properties, it says under used space: 370 GB. No idea why this is much more than the 292 GB that I added up and double checked.
Current disk image of my C drive is 315 GB.

So I would first like to clean up my C drive and move stuff to my second drive to be able to fit the image of my C drive onto the SSD which will become my new boot drive with windows.

I read on the net that I can move my library to a different drive (my documents, pictures, music and videos). This would free up 150 GB. Now it gets confusing for me. Will I be able to fit the image onto the SSD now? Total from above says 290 GB - 150 GB = 140 GB so I would say no it won't, correct?

Next I could choose to uninstall some games since you cannot move them to another drive and then after the SSD is installed I will not be able to install games on the SSD due to lack of space or maybe just a few games. So then what's the point in having an SSD? Wouldn't the performance drop with games installed on a second regular drive be huge compared to when the games are installed on the SSD? Or does this not influence performance when your games are on another drive since windows is on the SSD?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Arno]

Hello all,

First of all, sorry for writing so much but I want to be as clear and
correct as possible to avoid you guys having to ask more info each time
because I'm not clear enough.

I bought a 120 GB SSD drive which is not installed yet and my pc currently
has 2 regular hard drives of 1 TB each. I am running windows 7 x64
ultimate and I would like to restore an image file onto the SSD so that I
do not need to do a clean install and reinstall all my programs and games.

However you can already guess my current C drive contents do not fit on
the SSD. The largest folders on my C are:
- GAMES: about 100 GB
- Program files: 3 GB
- Program files (x86): 4 GB
- ProgramData: 7 GB
- Users: 175 GB (of which My documents, pictures, music, videos are 150 GB)
- Windows: 22 GB

TOTAL: 290 GB plus some smaller folders of 2 GB so 292 GB total. When I
right-click C drive - properties, it says under used space: 370 GB. No
idea why this is much more than the 292 GB that I added up and double
checked.

Files take a multiple of the full disk blcok size away from the free
space, but take up only the bystes in them. Theare are filesystems
that can use parts of blocks, but even the Linux folks are not really
convinced this is worthwhile doing. (Unless you count Hans Reiser, but
he is in prison for murder...)

Current disk image of my C drive is 315 GB.

So I would first like to clean up my C drive and move stuff to my second
drive to be able to fit the image of my C drive onto the SSD which will
become my new boot drive with windows.

I read on the net that I can move my library to a different drive (my
documents, pictures, music and videos). This would free up 150 GB. Now
it gets confusing for me. Will I be able to fit the image onto the SSD
now? Total from above says 290 GB - 150 GB = 140 GB so I would say no it
won't, correct?
Correct.

Next I could choose to uninstall some games since you cannot move them to
another drive

That depends. If the developers did this cleanly, it is possible.
For example, you can move a WOW-installation just by copying it
over. For other games it depends, but at least you can install
almost all games today on a different location than c:. I do
this routinely, as I do not have windows c: on any of my two
SSDs. Since I use Windows only for gaming and boot-times are
pretty irrelevant IMO, I think that is the best set-up for me.
(Most folks will disagree and quote improved boot-times and
application start times. I find them to be pretty irrelevant
except for frequently used applications and those I put on the
SSD.)

and then after the SSD is installed I will not be able to
install games on the SSD due to lack of space or maybe just a few games.

Another reason why I have all games on the SSD and noting of windows.

So then what's the point in having an SSD? Wouldn't the performance drop
with games installed on a second regular drive be huge compared to when
the games are installed on the SSD?

It depends, but generally it does.

Or does this not influence
performance when your games are on another drive since windows is on the
SSD?

Most components of Windows that are needed are in memory after a short
while anyways (if not, get morememory, it is cheap). So really the
only thing getting faster if you put c: on an SSD is booting (pretty
irrelevant) and start of applications installed on c: (I think you
do not even need to put office on c: today....).

Thanks in advance for your help.

My advice would be to not put c: on the SSD, but all the games
and applications you care about. Definitely do not put any music
or videos on the SSD. You may consider putting the pagefile
on the SSD, but only if you have less than 8GB or so. In that
case, I highly recomment upgrading to 8GB or 16GB.

Arno

 

[delta007bhd]

Files take a multiple of the full disk blcok size away from the free

space, but take up only the bystes in them. Theare are filesystems

that can use parts of blocks, but even the Linux folks are not really

convinced this is worthwhile doing. (Unless you count Hans Reiser, but

he is in prison for murder...)













That depends. If the developers did this cleanly, it is possible.

For example, you can move a WOW-installation just by copying it

over. For other games it depends, but at least you can install

almost all games today on a different location than c:. I do

this routinely, as I do not have windows c: on any of my two

SSDs. Since I use Windows only for gaming and boot-times are

pretty irrelevant IMO, I think that is the best set-up for me.

(Most folks will disagree and quote improved boot-times and

application start times. I find them to be pretty irrelevant

except for frequently used applications and those I put on the

SSD.)







Another reason why I have all games on the SSD and noting of windows.








It depends, but generally it does.








Most components of Windows that are needed are in memory after a short

while anyways (if not, get morememory, it is cheap). So really the

only thing getting faster if you put c: on an SSD is booting (pretty

irrelevant) and start of applications installed on c: (I think you

do not even need to put office on c: today....).






My advice would be to not put c: on the SSD, but all the games

and applications you care about. Definitely do not put any music

or videos on the SSD. You may consider putting the pagefile

on the SSD, but only if you have less than 8GB or so. In that

case, I highly recomment upgrading to 8GB or 16GB.



Arno

--

Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: (e-mail address removed)

GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F

Thank you Arno for your advise.

I have 16 GB of RAM. So you would recommend to leave only windows and some programs on my regular C drive and then reinstalling all games and the mostimportant programs onto the second D drive (SSD)? Will I benefit from the SSD's speed when running the programs from it, even though it's not my primary boot drive that contains windows?

What if for example I would install 2 SSD's, one for C windows and all it'sprograms and the other as D drive for games only? Would that give better performance compared to the above or is that not really worth the investment?



If I leave my windows as it is on a regular hard drive and then reinstall the games as you said onto the SSD as a D drive, would that give me the sameperformance as when I would buy a second SSD, one for windows C and the other for the games?

 

[delta007bhd]

Files take a multiple of the full disk blcok size away from the free

space, but take up only the bystes in them. Theare are filesystems

that can use parts of blocks, but even the Linux folks are not really

convinced this is worthwhile doing. (Unless you count Hans Reiser, but

he is in prison for murder...)













That depends. If the developers did this cleanly, it is possible.

For example, you can move a WOW-installation just by copying it

over. For other games it depends, but at least you can install

almost all games today on a different location than c:. I do

this routinely, as I do not have windows c: on any of my two

SSDs. Since I use Windows only for gaming and boot-times are

pretty irrelevant IMO, I think that is the best set-up for me.

(Most folks will disagree and quote improved boot-times and

application start times. I find them to be pretty irrelevant

except for frequently used applications and those I put on the

SSD.)







Another reason why I have all games on the SSD and noting of windows.








It depends, but generally it does.








Most components of Windows that are needed are in memory after a short

while anyways (if not, get morememory, it is cheap). So really the

only thing getting faster if you put c: on an SSD is booting (pretty

irrelevant) and start of applications installed on c: (I think you

do not even need to put office on c: today....).






My advice would be to not put c: on the SSD, but all the games

and applications you care about. Definitely do not put any music

or videos on the SSD. You may consider putting the pagefile

on the SSD, but only if you have less than 8GB or so. In that

case, I highly recomment upgrading to 8GB or 16GB.



Arno

--

Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: (e-mail address removed)

GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F

Thank you Arno for your advise.

I have 16 GB of RAM. So you would recommend to leave only windows and some programs on my regular C drive and then reinstalling all games and the mostimportant programs onto the second D drive (SSD)? Will I benefit from the SSD's speed when running the programs from it, even though it's not my primary boot drive that contains windows?

What if for example I would install 2 SSD's, one for C windows and all it'sprograms and the other as D drive for games only? Would that give better performance compared to the above or is that not really worth the investment?

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I bought a 120 GB SSD drive which is not installed yet and my pc
currently has 2 regular hard drives of 1 TB each. I am running
windows 7 x64 ultimate and I would like to restore an image file onto
the SSD so that I do not need to do a clean install and reinstall all
my programs and games.

First, is it too late to return the 120GB SSD and replace it with a
240GB SSD?

However you can already guess my current C drive contents do not fit
on the SSD. The largest folders on my C are: - GAMES: about 100 GB -
Program files: 3 GB - Program files (x86): 4 GB - ProgramData: 7 GB -
Users: 175 GB (of which My documents, pictures, music, videos are 150
GB) - Windows: 22 GB TOTAL: 290 GB plus some smaller folders of 2 GB
so 292 GB total. When I right-click C drive - properties, it says
under used space: 370 GB. No idea why this is much more than the 292
GB that I added up and double checked. Current disk image of my C
drive is 315 GB.

I'd say definitely move that stuff out of your Users folders into
another drive, and just have them symbolically linked back to the
original Users location.

Next I could choose to uninstall some games since you cannot move
them to another drive and then after the SSD is installed I will not
be able to install games on the SSD due to lack of space or maybe
just a few games. So then what's the point in having an SSD? Wouldn't
the performance drop with games installed on a second regular drive
be huge compared to when the games are installed on the SSD? Or does
this not influence performance when your games are on another drive
since windows is on the SSD?

A lot of the slowness of stuff running in Windows is Windows itself.
Windows contains a lot of dynamically linked libraries which all
programs make use of. Just having those Windows components in the SSD
will automatically make other programs faster, even if they still reside
on slow, older HDD storage.

You don't own a Tardis, you can't just fit more stuff inside than there
is space on it for. So you're going to have to sacrifice something, and
sacrificing the games and leaving them on hard drives is what you're
going to have to do to fit things into such a small SSD.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Lynn McGuire]

Hello all,

First of all, sorry for writing so much but I want to be as clear and correct as possible to avoid you guys having to ask more info each time because I'm not clear enough.

I bought a 120 GB SSD drive which is not installed yet and my pc currently has 2 regular hard drives of 1 TB each. I am running windows 7 x64 ultimate and I would like to restore an image file onto the SSD so that I do not need to do a clean install and reinstall all my programs and games.

However you can already guess my current C drive contents do not fit on the SSD. The largest folders on my C are:
- GAMES: about 100 GB
- Program files: 3 GB
- Program files (x86): 4 GB
- ProgramData: 7 GB
- Users: 175 GB (of which My documents, pictures, music, videos are 150 GB)
- Windows: 22 GB
TOTAL: 290 GB plus some smaller folders of 2 GB so 292 GB total.
When I right-click C drive - properties, it says under used space: 370 GB. No idea why this is much more than the 292 GB that I added up and double checked.
Current disk image of my C drive is 315 GB.

So I would first like to clean up my C drive and move stuff to my second drive to be able to fit the image of my C drive onto the SSD which will become my new boot drive with windows.

I read on the net that I can move my library to a different drive (my documents, pictures, music and videos). This would free up 150 GB. Now it gets confusing for me. Will I be able to fit the image onto the SSD now? Total from above says 290 GB - 150 GB = 140 GB so I would say no it won't, correct?

Next I could choose to uninstall some games since you cannot move them to another drive and then after the SSD is installed I will not be able to install games on the SSD due to lack of space or maybe just a few games. So then what's the point in having an SSD? Wouldn't the performance drop with games installed on a second regular drive be huge compared to when the games are installed on the SSD? Or does this not influence performance when your games are on another drive since windows is on the SSD?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Be sure to kill your pagination and hibernation
files. That will get you 30 GB back on your SSD:
http://ask-leo.com/what_are_hiberfilsys_and_pagefilesys_and_how_do_i_remove_them.html
http://pocketpccentral.net/blog/2012/04/05/disable-hiberfil-pagefile/

Lynn

 

[delta007bhd]

First, is it too late to return the 120GB SSD and replace it with a

240GB SSD?

No, I went to the store to ask this but he advises to keep only my windows installation on the SSD and my program files and then install my games ontoa regular D drive. The exe files of the games are run from the main C drive anyway under a win32 folder or so he said. So by installing games on a separate and regular sata drive, I will have no performance drop. I asked himwhat about the exe files that reside in the game installation directory inthat second drive. He says they are ghost files but the real exe's are runfrom the C drive which is the SSD.

I'd say definitely move that stuff out of your Users folders into
another drive, and just have them symbolically linked back to the
original Users location.

OK, that's done. Moved documents, pictures, music and videos to another drive. But I do not understand what you mean with "symbolically linked". The way I did it is:
- Created 4 folders on my D drive: documents, music, pictures, videos
- Copied contents of my C drive's documents, music, pictures and videos to the new folders on D. When copied ok, deleted the contents of the folders on C.
- In explorer window in the left pane under "Libraries" right-clicked "Documents", then properties and under "library locations" deleted the default location on C and added the one on D. Same for the other 3 libraries. Now mylibraries point to D when clicking on documents or the others.

Another thing I thought of is, when I install a game/program that puts a folder with user settings in your "my documents" folder, I noticed this goes to the default "C:\users\name\My Documents" folder. Is this ok? Or how do Itell windows that my documents folder is now on D? Is that what you mean with symbolically link them?

A lot of the slowness of stuff running in Windows is Windows itself.
Windows contains a lot of dynamically linked libraries which all
programs make use of. Just having those Windows components in the SSD
will automatically make other programs faster, even if they still reside
on slow, older HDD storage.

OK, that matches with what the vendor at the computer store meant with install windows on SSD and games and large files on separate hard drive.

Thanks,

Alex

 

[delta007bhd]

Be sure to kill your pagination and hibernation

files. That will get you 30 GB back on your SSD:

http://ask-leo.com/what_are_hiberfilsys_and_pagefilesys_and_how_do_i_remove_them.html

http://pocketpccentral.net/blog/2012/04/05/disable-hiberfil-pagefile/

Lynn

Thanks, I read about the hiberfil.sys but I didn't know about the pagefile.sys Switching these off doesn't have a detrimental effect on the pc? I got a warning message when turning off virtual memory.

Saved me another 27,8 GB by turning both off.

 

[Arno]

delta007bhd wrote:

[...]

Thank you Arno for your advise.

I have 16 GB of RAM. So you would recommend to leave only windows and some
programs on my regular C drive and then reinstalling all games and the
most important programs onto the second D drive (SSD)? Will I benefit
from the SSD's speed when running the programs from it, even though it's
not my primary boot drive that contains windows?

Yes. This obsession with c: is a windows thing. No sane system
does it (well, no sane system has drive letters today...). It
is untrue even on windows. Basically all data on application
start comes from the drive the application is on, except for
some libraries, but they are in RAM after first usage.

What if for example I would install 2 SSD's, one for C windows and all
it's programs and the other as D drive for games only? Would that give
better performance compared to the above or is that not really worth the
investment?

I cannot really tell you. My guess is that the only thing you
really gain is faster boot and maybe a bit of speed increase
when some applications are started for the first time. That would
mean it is a waste of money.

If I leave my windows as it is on a regular hard drive and then reinstall
the games as you said onto the SSD as a D drive, would that give me the
same performance as when I would buy a second SSD, one for windows C and
the other for the games?

My guess is that may give you very slightly better performance.
My advice would be to try it out with Windows on conventional HDD
and Apps/Games on SSD.

Arno

 

[Lynn McGuire]

Thanks, I read about the hiberfil.sys but I didn't know about the pagefile.sys Switching these off doesn't have a detrimental effect on the pc? I got a warning message when turning off virtual memory.

Saved me another 27,8 GB by turning both off.

You do not need paging with 16 GB of ram.

You cannot hibernate anymore with hibernation
turned off. Big whoop.

Lynn

 

[Yousuf Khan]

No, I went to the store to ask this but he advises to keep only my
windows installation on the SSD and my program files and then install
my games onto a regular D drive. The exe files of the games are run
from the main C drive anyway under a win32 folder or so he said. So
by installing games on a separate and regular sata drive, I will have
no performance drop. I asked him what about the exe files that reside
in the game installation directory in that second drive. He says they
are ghost files but the real exe's are run from the C drive which is
the SSD.

Well, that's a lot of BS that he fed you. However, he is right in the
fact that a lot of the shared DLL's are run directly from the Windows
folder, but not the main executable. The main executable is run from the
directory in which it is installed. However, the main executable is not
that important anyways, the majority of the time the programs are busy
executing system functions.

OK, that's done. Moved documents, pictures, music and videos to
another drive. But I do not understand what you mean with
"symbolically linked". The way I did it is:

Symbolic linking is feature similar to the "Shortcuts" feature that's
been around in Windows since Windows 95, only more powerful. It's a way
of aliasing the names of files and folders into different locations
without actually physically copying them to those locations. So for
example, if you have a folder in d: drive called "d:\xyz", and you want
to be able to access it from your "my documents" folder in the c: drive,
you would just create a symlink to it, and you'll then have a folder
called "c:\users\username\my documents\xyz".

Here's how it works:

NTFS symbolic link - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link

The reason it's more powerful than the old Shortcuts feature is because
programs can't tell the difference between a symlinked file and the
original file, because it accesses the original file transparently.

- Created 4 folders on my D drive: documents, music, pictures,
videos - Copied contents of my C drive's documents, music, pictures
and videos to the new folders on D. When copied ok, deleted the
contents of the folders on C. - In explorer window in the left pane
under "Libraries" right-clicked "Documents", then properties and
under "library locations" deleted the default location on C and added
the one on D. Same for the other 3 libraries. Now my libraries point
to D when clicking on documents or the others.

Using the Libraries feature is another good way of doing this, but
symbolic links would've been even more completely transparent. You
wouldn't even have to change the configurations of programs.

Another thing I thought of is, when I install a game/program that
puts a folder with user settings in your "my documents" folder, I
noticed this goes to the default "C:\users\name\My Documents" folder.
Is this ok? Or how do I tell windows that my documents folder is now
on D? Is that what you mean with symbolically link them?

Yup symbolic links would've helped here, for sure. Here's a GUI that
will help in making symbolic links for you. In the Wikipedia article
above it shows you how to create symlinks from command-line using a
program called mklink, but this one will do it from the GUI.

symlinker - Symbolic Link Creator. GUI for mklink, Microsoft Windows
symlink utility - Google Project Hosting
http://code.google.com/p/symlinker/

OK, that matches with what the vendor at the computer store meant
with install windows on SSD and games and large files on separate
hard drive.

Yeah, he just said it to you while lying. He probably lied to make it
simpler for you, but I don't think the real story is all that much more
complicated to explain than the lie.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Thanks, I read about the hiberfil.sys but I didn't know about the
pagefile.sys Switching these off doesn't have a detrimental effect on
the pc? I got a warning message when turning off virtual memory.

No, don't switch them off, just move them to the hard drives. Moving the
pagefile is good practice anyways with an SSD, in order to maximize the
life of the SSD. If you have the hard drives available as your secondary
option, then use them.

Saved me another 27,8 GB by turning both off.

Good, but recreate the pagefile on the hard drive.

windows 7 - How can I move the page file to another physical disk
location? - Super User
http://superuser.com/questions/237813/how-can-i-move-the-page-file-to-another-physical-disk-location

You have no choice on the hiberfil.sys though, it will always be on the
boot drive. So you're choice might be to never use hibernate or let it
stay. I am of mixed opinion about the value of hibernate vs. sleep.
Hibernate will let you recover from a power outage, but sleep will not,
if a power failure occurs while a computer is sleeping/hibernating.

relocate hiberfil.sys
http://social.technet.microsoft.com.../thread/b5baa5bf-bdb2-4c9e-8795-1441f59700a0/

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

You do not need paging with 16 GB of ram.

No, you always need to have paging file otherwise mysterious failures
will occur on the system. The paging system is not just used only when
you run out of main memory. It is also being used even with plenty of
memory available, because most modern operating systems are demand-paged
systems. That means that they are always scanning memory for stuff that
isn't being used very much, and writing it out to disk. The pagefile
basically acts as a scratchpad area for the system memory manager. The
pagefile won't necessarily be very large with 16GB of RAM available, so
it's not really a huge burden.

You cannot hibernate anymore with hibernation
turned off. Big whoop.

I'd say hibernate is a better choice than sleep in power-failure prone
areas. Windows 7 even has a new hybrid sleep-hibernate feature where it
saves a hibernate file to disk just prior to going to sleep. So if there
is no power failure you recover as quickly as you would during sleep,
but if a power failure did occur then you still recover but from the
hibernate file instead.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Arno]

No, you always need to have paging file otherwise mysterious failures
will occur on the system. The paging system is not just used only when
you run out of main memory. It is also being used even with plenty of
memory available, because most modern operating systems are demand-paged
systems. That means that they are always scanning memory for stuff that
isn't being used very much, and writing it out to disk. The pagefile
basically acts as a scratchpad area for the system memory manager. The
pagefile won't necessarily be very large with 16GB of RAM available, so
it's not really a huge burden.

It used to be like that, at least on Linux it is not so anymore and
I suspect on Win 7 in non-server config it is so too. You can still
run out of memory in surprising ways, but it has become rare.

Arno

 

[delta007bhd]

Well, that's a lot of BS that he fed you. However, he is right in the

fact that a lot of the shared DLL's are run directly from the Windows

folder, but not the main executable. The main executable is run from the

directory in which it is installed. However, the main executable is not

that important anyways, the majority of the time the programs are busy

executing system functions.








Symbolic linking is feature similar to the "Shortcuts" feature that's

been around in Windows since Windows 95, only more powerful. It's a way

of aliasing the names of files and folders into different locations

without actually physically copying them to those locations. So for

example, if you have a folder in d: drive called "d:\xyz", and you want

to be able to access it from your "my documents" folder in the c: drive,

you would just create a symlink to it, and you'll then have a folder

called "c:\users\username\my documents\xyz".



Here's how it works:



NTFS symbolic link - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link



The reason it's more powerful than the old Shortcuts feature is because

programs can't tell the difference between a symlinked file and the

original file, because it accesses the original file transparently.













Using the Libraries feature is another good way of doing this, but

symbolic links would've been even more completely transparent. You

wouldn't even have to change the configurations of programs.










Yup symbolic links would've helped here, for sure. Here's a GUI that

will help in making symbolic links for you. In the Wikipedia article

above it shows you how to create symlinks from command-line using a

program called mklink, but this one will do it from the GUI.



symlinker - Symbolic Link Creator. GUI for mklink, Microsoft Windows

symlink utility - Google Project Hosting

http://code.google.com/p/symlinker/








Yeah, he just said it to you while lying. He probably lied to make it

simpler for you, but I don't think the real story is all that much more

complicated to explain than the lie.



Yousuf Khan

Wow, I never heard of symbolic links before. I had to look more info up on the net and now I understand how it works. I tried it with a test folder and it works. But when I tried it on my documents folder it didn't:

I cut the folder "my documents" out of C:\users\name\ and paste it into root of D: drive. Then opened cmd prompt as admin and typed:
mklink /d "C:\Users\name\My Documents" "D:\My Documents"
Cannot create a file when that file already exists.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Wow, I never heard of symbolic links before. I had to look more info
up on the net and now I understand how it works. I tried it with a
test folder and it works. But when I tried it on my documents folder
it didn't:

I cut the folder "my documents" out of C:\users\name\ and paste it
into root of D: drive. Then opened cmd prompt as admin and typed:
mklink /d "C:\Users\name\My Documents" "D:\My Documents" Cannot
create a file when that file already exists.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Yeah, you can't replace a folder or a file that already exists in the
destination directory, with a symlink. You have to first delete the file
or folder in the destination before you can create a symlink with the
same name in it. So in your case, you'd have to actually remove the "My
Documents" folder before creating the symlink called "My Documents". Or
else you'll end up with a symlink called "c:\users\name\my documents\my
documents".

That application that I gave you a URL to called Symlinker has the
ability to automatically transfer files from original to new location
and then erase the originals and replace them with symlinks.

But I wouldn't try that first with the My Documents folder, try a
different less important folder first as a test, and then try My
Documents later.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Lynn McGuire]

No, you always need to have paging file otherwise mysterious failures
will occur on the system. The paging system is not just used only when
you run out of main memory. It is also being used even with plenty of
memory available, because most modern operating systems are demand-paged
systems. That means that they are always scanning memory for stuff that
isn't being used very much, and writing it out to disk. The pagefile
basically acts as a scratchpad area for the system memory manager. The
pagefile won't necessarily be very large with 16GB of RAM available, so
it's not really a huge burden.


I'd say hibernate is a better choice than sleep in power-failure prone
areas. Windows 7 even has a new hybrid sleep-hibernate feature where it
saves a hibernate file to disk just prior to going to sleep. So if there
is no power failure you recover as quickly as you would during sleep,
but if a power failure did occur then you still recover but from the
hibernate file instead.

Yousuf Khan

Yes, I have a 4 MB pagination file as the doco
recommends.

I also have a UPS so I do not need to worry
about hibernation.

Lynn

 

[Yousuf Khan]

There is no problem with putting the swap on an SSD - in fact, it makes
a lot of sense because it will be faster. You are not going to make any
difference to the lifetime of the disk unless you have bought the most
low-end cheapo SSD you can find, and you seriously thrash your swapping
by having far too little ram.

Yeah, I used to think putting swap on the SSD would degrade its lifetime
too, before I had bought an SSD and found out that a lot of the worries
are overblown. If your pagefile activity isn't very big, then it really
doesn't matter, the amount of additional life gained would be minuscule.
But still, I think if you have the option of putting the swap on an SSD
or an HDD, then put it on the HDD, just to avoid any additional stress
on the SSD.

I personally have the option of putting the pagefile on one of five
other HDD's, and I've decided to put a bit of it on every one of them.
I've put fixed size pagefiles on the first 4 HDD's, and a variable sized
one on the 5th. If you have a disk activity monitoring gadget, then you
can see that whenever swap activity is happening it spreads the workload
around round-robin on each drive. I think in Windows you can have upto
either 8 or 16 separate pagefile locations, I don't remember which.

Yousuf Khan

 

[delta007bhd]

Yeah, you can't replace a folder or a file that already exists in the

destination directory, with a symlink. You have to first delete the file

or folder in the destination before you can create a symlink with the

same name in it. So in your case, you'd have to actually remove the "My

Documents" folder before creating the symlink called "My Documents". Or

else you'll end up with a symlink called "c:\users\name\my documents\my

documents".



That application that I gave you a URL to called Symlinker has the

ability to automatically transfer files from original to new location

and then erase the originals and replace them with symlinks.



But I wouldn't try that first with the My Documents folder, try a

different less important folder first as a test, and then try My

Documents later.



Yousuf Khan

Ok so now I have come to the point that it becomes really complicated and frustrating and I think it's all screwed up.

To summarise till now, before I installed SSD I had to clean up C so that my disk image restore fits on the SSD. So I moved documents, music, videos and pictures folders to D by selecting cut and paste.

Then created disk image of C and restored this to SSD. SSD is now C and started up with this. Documents, videos, music, pics are still on D. Apparently symbolic links do not work because there's a screwup of names. If I rightclick Documents folder on D and select properties and go to Location tab the filepath is miraculously D:\My Documents instead of D:\Documents as it appears in explorer. Then for My pictures folder on D the location tab says Pictures. My music folder is Music. This doesn't make sense??

In cmd prompt I typed as you can read in my previous post:

mklink /d "C:\Users\name\My Documents" "D:\My Documents"
Cannot create a file when that file already exists.

Now I tried:
mklink /d "C:\Users\name\My Documents" "D:\Documents"
Cannot create a file when that file already exists.

Then:
mklink /d "C:\Users\name\Documents" "D:\My Documents"
symbolic link created for C:\Users\name\Documents
And this put a shortcut folder on C:\Users\name\Documents while on my D drive there is a folder Documents which if I right click it and select properties, then location tab refers to path D:\My Documents. I think I'm getting nuts here.

i want to start over again and deleted the symlink folder Documents on C and tried to put "My Documents" back onto C but I get a warning <<<"C:\Users\Sasja\My Documents\ is not accessible. Access is denied.>>> I'm really getting frustrated now. And then I didnt mention this stupid itunes program yet that takes an engineer with a PhD to move you itunes media folder to a different location.

Thanks for your help. I'm desperate. I need a beer. Make that 10.

 

[Rod Speed]

Yousuf Khan wrote

The stress will be worse for the HDD's lifetime than for the SSD's
lifetime.

Nope, use has no effect on HDD lifetimes when the drives are rotating
all the time otherwise.

Even the increased head activity has no effect on HDD lifetime.

If you have a decent quality SSD of 120 GB or higher, you can probably
write to it at 20 MB/s continuously for /years/ before you will wear it
out.

Just as true of HDDs.