Installing/playing games from a seperate hard drive

Hi,

I'm getting a bit low on HD space, so to free some up I was deciding to not have to upgrade my C drive and reinstall everything but to install the larger games I have like Oblivion, Stalker, NwN2. HL2, CSS onto my secondary IDE master drive and play them from there which has tons of room. Could this cause any foreseeable problems? Ive been reading little reports on playing games from a different hard drives and I guess its down to how your system performs, but I'd like to find some more feedback before I decide fully.

Spec: AMD 2600+, 2 gig ram, AMD X1650 Pro (256MB), Vista Home Premium. 1x 80gig internal IDE (master) 1x 40gig internal IDE(slave), 1 x 500gig internal IDE Secondary master (all ATA133 drives) DVD Writer as secondary slave.

(I've had to put the 500g drive as secondary master as it just wont work in DMA mode as slave on primary IDE)

Cheers!

 

You shouldn't have a problem aside from a slight increase in load times, and that probably won't be noticeable. If you're really concerned about performance, you're best off using a lower capacity, faster drive (or drives, if RAID is your thing~) for your OS and app/game installs, and using secondary drives for storage. However, with a mid level system/drives (like yours) I doubt you'll notice any change in speed.

 

I'll give it a try and see what happens, but would it also be better to make my PageFile sit on this hard drive as well?

 

Game wise, don't think it'll matter considering you've got 2 gigs of ram, but for editing software and whatnot, it might make a difference. Really, you're best off experimenting to determine which setup makes the most sense. I honestly doubt you'll see any difference from playing games off a drive separate from your OS, aside from load times (maybe), but you're not risking a meltdown or anything by trying and/or experimenting with your page file, so do some google searching and go for it!