Second hard drive for game installation

Level1Techs INBOX.deb
1

Hi guys, long term watcher of the tek from Dominican republic here with a question that is burning my mind :

 

i have a huge steam collection of games as well as some on origin and im running out of space in my primary hard drive and id like to know :

1 :besides the loading times how having the games installed in a hard drive different than the one with the OS affects performance ?

2 : where the do the games load the texture, sound ect ? in the RAM ?

 3 : do having the games in a separated hard drive affect FPS even if the game is fully loaded " see second question"

4 : if i must install the in a secondary hard drive how can i improve the performance of such games ?

 

thanks in advance for the response 

3

I have all my games stored on a separate hard drive and I've never noticed any ill effects from it.

4

lol I have a SSD for boot, and 2 1 TB hard drives, because my first 1 TB hard drive filled up because of games, anime, and movies. Now I have 2 hard drives that are a bit past half full. but yeah, having a hard drive specifically for games will help with load times since there won't be any background programs taking up HDD time.

5

I have four drives in my system, one for programs and games, the other for media files. I have never had any issues with lag it even makes re-installing the OS easier if you muck it up.

6

".....four drives.....one for programs and games, the other for media files."

what happened to the other two?? :D

7

aliens

8

Like the others have said, there should be no issues loading games from a second hard drive.  Lots of people do it, especially those with small SSD boot drives like me.  If anything, you might see a small improvement in load times, but that's about it.

9

Two OSes, I forgot about that XD. One 500GB is for my Linux OS and the 80 GB SSD is for Windows 7.

10

The only performance decrease you may see is in Windows 8 the HDD is turned off after idle for X amount of time (by default.) Sometimes when I go to read from my storage drive it takes a moment for it to spin up and read.

11

thanks  for the replies, that gives me peace of mind since my pc isn't that fast to begin with and ill make sure my HDDs aren't turned off by win 8.1 by default  

thanks again