Hiya guys I need some advice and tips.

 

 

First off I have had an SSD for awhile now but due to 8 gig a month have not set up my rig with it yet. I want to use it for my OS and main games I play and use my other HDD for storage.

 

I also have a 6 year old HDD that I can throw in.

 

I can get my OS installed fine I've done quite a few formats and installations. What I've not ever really done is organize my files into anything that remotely looks tidy.

 

When I upgraded for example I just put Win7 onto my faster HDD and just dumped files across as needed. This has created a mess of duplicate files like music and photos. I also still have old windows on my very old HDD.

 

When I install Win7 on my SSD I will still have windows on both my old HDD's.

 

How do I format those without reinstalling windows? It's a waste of space and surely it must cause some issues.

 

Also is there a good way of speeding up the process of eliminating duplicate files like music and photos or will I just have to go through each and every one the hard way?

 

One thought I had was getting an external and just dumping everything on that but of course this just leaves the external a mess and just puts off something that I should just get over with.

 

 

Another question is limiting downloads after a reinstall. Things like my bookmarks etc. Tips anyone?

Organizing files for me has always been a manual activity..

 

Formatting without reinstalling windows:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v491/catwaterboy/Fromatting.png

i have separate drives for everything

 

OS has its own physical drives (hardware raid 20k scsi 250gb)

Games has its own physical drives (hardware raid 2tb sata)

Programs has its own physical drive - 2tb

Media (music and video) has its own physical drive - 2tb

Zips and downloads (everything downloaded goes here) has its own physical drive - 500gb

Images (holds iso's) has its own physical drive - 2tb

My Docs (holds all my important stuff mail/docs/workstuff/backups/registry files etc) 500gb

Spare ( a spare drive for the just in case scenario ) 2tb

 

i then have removable hotswap drives for older stuff that gets pruned as the primary drives fill and network drives to linux boxes and media machines

 

get it sorted nice and it makes things smooth and simple, OS changes are a breeze, grab a copy of your registry - then get a copy of the software section of your registry ( holds all you cd keys paths etc ) i keep one for software and one for games - and always keep the drive letters the same.

i haven't installed bf2 since 2005 but i've had 3-4 OS upgrades and a couple of formats since.

 

You have to get a bit anal (giggle he said anal) about setting it all up and keeping it neat for a little while, but once its setup it so easy to keep tidy and to find stuff and when a drive shiits itself you don't loose everything, been doing it this way for many many years and in this day and age where bandwidth and data are cheap as chips and we build our computers in to mass storage machines (yes yes i leech to) its really the only way to go.

..... anal ......

 

*Snicker*

 

Agree with Spider on keeping a spare empty drive - when drives give up the ghost it usually happens pretty quickly. Also data that you don't have two copies of is data you don't care about.

Spider has shares in seagate or WD methinks. How you would fill even half those drives boggles my mind. I have 3 TB of storage for backups and media and I still haven't filled it.

im old and keep everything - ive still got irc logs from 92

 

get it sorted nice and it makes things smooth and simple, OS changes are a breeze, grab a copy of your registry - then get a copy of the software section of your registry ( holds all you cd keys paths etc ) i keep one for software and one for games - and always keep the drive letters the same.

i haven't installed bf2 since 2005 but i've had 3-4 OS upgrades and a couple of formats since.

 

 

 

 

That sounds like a good plan. I have my 120gig SSD an old 500gig HDD and a terabyte one too.

 

How do I save my registry? I've never done that. Sure would be nice to not have to install everything over and it would save me some of my download cap. I've got three games to download this month. BF3, Red Orchestra and Batman, Arkham Asylum.

 

Thanks for the advice everyone.

i read that when you install win 7 on a ssd then you remove any other hard drives or it will write to them even if you dont want it to. i presume this is the same for a hdd. then when your done plug the other drives back in. if you read review on ocz ones they say turn off indexing prefetch and superfetch because the ssd is fast enough and you dont need to index or store unnessary things in your ram.

 

to keep the os different i would think you might need to have both plugged in though because then it can pick up a boot loade... maybe.

i think as long as they were different partitions it should work. like winodws and linux would off 1 drive.

 

heads up the new windows stuff up (i mean 8) apparently only accepts it self and blocks all other os's

 

i got a similar set up to yours but with a 60gb ssd. i put all the other stuff on my hdd and let windows use the ssd (cause its so small adn things will fill it over time anyway.) but ill probably get a 260gb ssd cause thats all the space ill need.