We have all talked about SSDs and how great they are as your boot drive but I have had a ton of people asking me how to use an SSD for my boot drive and configure it to boot to that particular drive and access a mass hard drive for my storage and my larger programs. Today, I am going to show you guys how to do that.
Now step 1: Most of the time, you can only see one hard drive, however the system I have here clearly has a 120GB boot SSD and a two terabyte hard drive plugged into it for mass storage, so there some setups that we're going to have to do in order to make this all work correctly. Now the first step to getting this configured properly is the BIOS Setting. Just press the DELETE, or F2, or F11, or whatever is on your particular board.
Every BIOS is laid out a little bit differently, BIOS or UEFI, whichever they prefer to call it but in general you're going to look for setting called boot or boot options or boot menu. Once you go inside it, you are going to find a couple different things, so number one is its going to see a laid out boot options priorities screen. This will pick what type of device the computer will boot to first. In most cases, choosing hard disk for this will make the computer boots slightly faster because it will not spend time looking for things in one two, three, and fourth slots before finally booting to it. However if you set up hard drive as first, then if you want to boot to a CD or USB Drive then you have to make sure that you rearrange it or override it whenever you want to do that. However, it is not a simple as saying okay particular drive, they are not all in here, and most UEFIs have a hard disk drive BBS or boot priority so that way you are actually picking which of your hard drives is the one that will be booted to with the hard drive option.
Here you can pick your first one and you want to make sure it is your SSD. In here, we have an M4 SSD with a WD green drive for storage. We want to make sure that is our first boot drive is our first boot device and then we are ready to exit and save.
Disk Management
Now we can boot to Windows and we can see that the drive still does not show up so what we have to do now is go to my computer or computer or whatever it's called this a work in XP, Vista, 7 or 8, and go to “Manage.” You want to manage the computer. Specifically, you want the “disk management” setting. This will allow you to see drives that are attached to the computer but are not yet initialized or not yet partitioned. I can see here the boot drive with its 120 gigs. Here is that two terabyte mass storage because a 120 GB is not enough for large games and archiving videos and all that sort of stuff.
We are going to go ahead and we do not need to convert this in any way sometimes you have to initialize it first but it looks like all we need to do is right click and create a new volume. We can use pretty much the default options for everything. We can choose the drive letter or even mount in an empty NTFS folder so you could create a folder on your SSD Drive. For me personally, I prefer to use a drive letter. We are going to go with the NTFS default allocation size and you can actually label it, storage for example, quick format is fine for this and you click Finish. Once that is done, that drive will pop up as an option for you too look.
Program Installation
Installing programs to this storage drive will have to be manual. It is also important to choose a secondary drive that is optimal for what you are going to be doing. If you're going to be running high performance applications such as Photoshop or Premier or other demanding programs that are very large, I'd recommend using something like a black drive for your secondary storage whereas if you're just going to be archiving videos the Green Drive we showed you before is just fine. Now when installing programs, it is exactly the same procedures except when you reach the option where you have to click custom install or whatever else to change the drive that it's being installed to, so you can actually install the application onto your secondary drive.
Transferring Hard Drive
However, it should be noted that it is not as simple as taking that the drive-in plugging into another computer being able to run those programs. It does not work that way. It has pretty much tied to the computer where you installed it. Installing programs will always be manual. There are registry edits that you can use to do it but it is not really recommended because it can break stuff.
Downloads Folder
However, for things like download from the Internet or I your media repositories. Within your browser, usually it is just a matter of going to the general settings on the download settings, finding the option, and again using that Browse button to navigate to the secondary drive. We are going to create a folder called Firefox, looks Firefox downloads, and we can point every download that we do from Firefox to go there automatically.
Documents Folder
Things like your documents, pictures, music, this is simple, all you need to do is right click on those, go to properties, and you can change where to point the location of the library. You can create a new folder again on your secondary drive and then remove the old ones that were in there making that the default. Now whenever we navigate in Windows it will automatically take us there. Now for most other viewers on this channel I am sure this was a pretty
Caching Solutions
If you want to enjoy the speed of SSD with the storage of a hard drive, you need to set up a caching solution, as long as you have a reasonably modern Intel platform. You can use SRT. Alternately, there are cashing guides available such as the adrenaline from Crucial.
