Can someone explain to me the purpose to having more than one SSD or HDD. How do u download certain programs to certain ones and can you access them whenever? Will this make your PC download speed faster? Whats the whole deal with this? Thank you.
More storage is the main reason. Installing other operating systems on different drives makes things easier, rather than creating partitions. Running drives in a raid array as a fail safe. Your hard drive will eventually die and you don't want to loose that data.
Basically everything you use is run off of servers, which could easily have 40 drives per computer. Then imagine racks and racks of those for eternity inside of a massive warehouse.
The majority of people log in to their desktop, launch a web browser and log out a few hours later. They aren't really doing much, so home users really don't have a need for multiple drives.
If you're running windows, all of your programs are installed on your C drive, the other drives are used for storage, like games and pictures.
As for how to access it. The drives will show up like this
So I already have a 500gb HDD with everything on it as its my only one. Its filling up and I just bought a 1T HDD to add. Should I move all of my games to the 1T HDD and keep windows on my original 500gb HDD.
What speed are they? You want the fasted one for your operating system. But if they are the same then yes, that would be the easiest thing to do.
Okay, since you seem to be lacking a basic understanding of harddrives and data security as well as good drive management, I'll give you a few pointers. (You knot knowing is probably because nobody told you yet, not your fault).
Operating system:
An operating system with all the software you need (explicitly excluding games) will often need less than 100 Gigabytes. Operating systems sometimes need to be reinstalled (due to infaction or major driver fuckups or just being old and not well maintained (happens with gaming machines since you update drivers often and install/uninstall like a maniac).
Advice: Install it on the smaller harddrive if the new one is not vastly superior in terms of performance (which it probably won't be).
Sidenote: Installing your Windows on a SSD (solid state drive) is worthwhile, a 120/128 (whatever the manufacturer calls it) GB SSD is enough for windows if you install your games on another drive, those SSDs are comparably cheap, somewhere in the 40-60 dollar region. You can cheap out on the write speed of a 120Gig SSD without having trouble.
Data Security:
There is a reason I have 3 harddrives (and 2 SSDs) in my system. I use a tool to mirror some folders over two drives. Not for any performance gains but for data security. So one drive can die without me losing important data (mostly backups of old machines, icq logs of 2006 and so on). The Tool I use is Freecommander XE since it has a good folder compare and sync function. The data does not change that often that I would need to put the drives or partitions into a RAID.
Having a harddrive for exclusive use of only one program is sometimes beneficial since it is the only one writing and reading to and from the disk, that reduces slowdowns because of multiple access to one disk. Not important for Windows and gaming though. Your downloadspeed is often one or more orders of magnitude smaller than the read/write speed of your drive, that is nothing to worry about.
The most important takeaway is: Harddrives can and will fail. Don't immediately trust them, there is something like childhood mortality amongst electronics. If it does not break in the first couple of weeks it probably won't break for a couple of years. So at least save important data to two drives if possible. Backups are something you have to worry about before they happen, not after, much like STDs.
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Pretty much anything you download or programs you have you can then put on any drive you want. I do it so I have more space in certain drives and it also helps organize things better. For instance I put all my photos and photo programs/music on one drive. Games one another. Then I leave my ssd for OS and a few games I play all the time.