New dual-drive setup. Looking for advice

[Philly]

Hi,

I just finished setting up my mid 2012 mbp so it now has my Seagate Momentus XT 750GB hybrid in the primary bay, and a Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SSD in the superdrive bay. I had a few issues with the caddie but everything is now running very well from both bays, including booting up from either.

Prior to this I had Windows 7 on a partition of my hybrid so, my initial plan was to have OSx running from the hybrid and Windows 7 running from the new SSD. Windows will be used mostly for gaming. As I don't have much experience with having dual drives I wanted to seek some advice and opinions on what the best setup would be.

Would there be any worthwhile advantage from partitioning the drives and having the operating systems separate from the programs...? For instance, If I put windows on a small partition of the hybrid, and then all the windows content/games on the SSD...?



As a side note for a slightly different idea, could I partition the SSD to have windows on one partition and media storage for my mac OS on the other?

Thanks

 

[Philly]

Ok, I want to re-phrase my question.

Would Windows run any better or worse if it shared the SSD with Mac OSx? ie two partitions.

This is my first experience of solid state so I'm unsure but I'm wondering if it would run just as quick. If thats the case then I will run both OS's of the SSD and use the Hybrid for storage/media.

If that is the case then I have another question;

Would games run better (on Windows) if they ran from the hybrid, or from the same ssd as Windows?

Any help appreciated.

 

[austinpike]

I would partition the SSD half MacOS / half WindowsOS.
Use the hybrid as an EXFAT drive to share files between the two.

With that size SSD you might as well install both OS's there to get the most benefit from it. In terms of priority having the OS on the SSD is more important than keeping apps/games on it. But I would think with 500GB you would have enough space to install pretty much everything you would need... if you really have a ton of games then format the hybrid drive as NTFS install the overflow there.

Would Windows run any better or worse if it shared the SSD with Mac OSx? ie two partitions.

With a typical HD there are some performance differences based on whether the data lies toward the "inner" or "outer" sectors... so with two partitions, one of them would tend to be faster than the other. But with an SSD it really doesn't matter.

Would games run better (on Windows) if they ran from the hybrid, or from the same ssd as Windows?

You'll see better load times if the games are installed on the SSD, but beyond that it won't make a difference. I'd put everything you can on the SSD until you get it past ~50% full, then start installing stuff on the hybrid drive.

 

[Philly]

In my case I think even 300gb would suffice for windows + games + free space. I don't have that many games and most are off Steam so I don't need to keep them all at once.

Keeping the hybrid as one partition, EXFAT, is a great suggestion.

Thanks man!

 

[snaky69]

Ok, I want to re-phrase my question.

Would Windows run any better or worse if it shared the SSD with Mac OSx? ie two partitions.

This is my first experience of solid state so I'm unsure but I'm wondering if it would run just as quick. If thats the case then I will run both OS's of the SSD and use the Hybrid for storage/media.

If that is the case then I have another question;

Would games run better (on Windows) if they ran from the hybrid, or from the same ssd as Windows?

Any help appreciated.

I don't think you understand what SSD's do in terms of performance improvement.

SSD's are faster in read and write operations than traditional hard drives. That's what they're good at.

When does this matter? At bootup, and when opening apps, or moving large amounts of data around.

Why? Because when you boot, or open an app, the OS, or the app, gets read off of the hard drive(or SSD) and put into RAM. The faster what is needed is put into RAM, the faster it opens.

Once that is done, SSD speeds have no bearing at all on computing speed. None. So say, for gaming, the SSD'll make the game open faster and load worlds or menus or what-have-you will open faster. But it won't magically make your game run better or won't net you anymore FPS than what you're getting now.

As to whether it matters if you put Windows on either disk: to the computer, it doesn't matter one bit. It all depends on how fast you want your bootcamp partition to boot.

One thing that does help is having one disk worry about the OS and the other about data. Since the OS disk is sometimes used as RAM when RAM ressources get low, having it being read off of by other apps will dramatically slow it down.

Personally, I run windows and OS X on my SSD, but I left a big partition on my second hard drive to serve as a game data folder. I get the best of both worlds that way.

 

[Freyqq]

Ok, I want to re-phrase my question.

Would Windows run any better or worse if it shared the SSD with Mac OSx? ie two partitions.

This is my first experience of solid state so I'm unsure but I'm wondering if it would run just as quick. If thats the case then I will run both OS's of the SSD and use the Hybrid for storage/media.

If that is the case then I have another question;

Would games run better (on Windows) if they ran from the hybrid, or from the same ssd as Windows?

Any help appreciated.

I would partition the SSD in half for the boot drives - one with OSX and one with Windows. That gives you the fastest speed for bootup, disk cache, and running system tasks. I would then partition the hybrid HD into 3 partitions - HFS, NTFS, and exfat. HFS for OSX, NTFS for Windows, and a small exfat partition as a swap drive to move files around between OS. I wouldn't rely on exfat for the whole drive, even though that would make things simpler. Exfat doesn't have journaling, so it is more prone to corruption. Also, it doesn't support many features of NTFS and HFS. For instance, you can't use it for time machine. File attributes don't work in exfat, like in NTFS. It's a file system designed for flash drives, not for big hard drives that store important data.

Then again, if all your data on the exfat drive is regularly backed up or not that important, then it would be fine to format the whole drive as exfat.

 

[Philly]

Snaky, in a roundabout way I do understand SSD's but it's good to have it spelt out like you did. The main thing I was unsure about was whether to keep programs on a separate drive than the OS or not. I felt that because the way a solid state works it wouldn't matter. I appreciate everyones advice here. I've split the EVO ssd between Mac and Windows 7.

As for the Hybrid drive, do any of you guys know how the partitioning works with the flash memory? This will have some effect on my decision. At this point I don't envision anything data too important being on there. Nothing that I couldn't get back.

 

[snaky69]

Snaky, in a roundabout way I do understand SSD's but it's good to have it spelt out like you did. The main thing I was unsure about was whether to keep programs on a separate drive than the OS or not. I felt that because the way a solid state works it wouldn't matter. I appreciate everyones advice here. I've split the EVO ssd between Mac and Windows 7.

As for the Hybrid drive, do any of you guys know how the partitioning works with the flash memory? This will have some effect on my decision. At this point I don't envision anything data too important being on there. Nothing that I couldn't get back.

There is no special partitioning to do on the seagate drive. It decides by itself what to keep on the SSD depending on usage.

 

[Philly]

Very grateful for everyones help, thank you.... 😀