HDD Questions

Casterina · July 14, 2016

I have just built my new rig with Samsung 850 EVO 120GB, Sandisk Ultra II 240GB and 1TB WD Blue and have some hard drive questions that I'm not sure about,

1. Will there be any conflict if I install Samsung Magician and Sandisk SSD Dashboard to monitor the SSD?

2. The 850 EVO 120GB will be my OS drive and the 250GB Sandisk will be my games drive, should I install Steam on the OS drive and point the games location to the Sandisk drive or just do both on the Sandisk?

3. How would I format all my hard drives? Via the Windows installation when installing the OS or in Windows?

4. In the Power options under turn off hard disk after x amount of minutes, does that spin down all my hard drives or just the 1TB WD Blue? As I heard it is bad for the SSD?

Many thanks!

pwn_intended · July 14, 2016

1. no.

2. Up to you, I would keep steam on the OS drive as steam itself doesn't take up much space, and you can still install games on whatever drive you want, regardless of where steam is installed.

3. Also up to you, formatting the main boot drive is easiest through windows installer. The other drives will likely already be formatted but if not, windows will prompt you with what you'd like to do with then once youre actually booted into windows. you can also use disk management to initialize them. It should be pretty straight forward but feel free to ask away here if you have difficulties once you got to this step.

4. Don't worry about the power options, especially if you're using win10 since it is quite SSD aware, ie. it wont let you defrag an SSD, only optimize it.

Mira Yurizaki · July 14, 2016

20 minutes ago, Casterina said:

I have just built my new rig with Samsung 850 EVO 120GB, Sandisk Ultra II 240GB and 1TB WD Blue and have some hard drive questions that I'm not sure about,

1. Will there be any conflict if I install Samsung Magician and Sandisk SSD Dashboard to monitor the SSD?

2. The 850 EVO 120GB will be my OS drive and the 250GB Sandisk will be my games drive, should I install Steam on the OS drive and point the games location to the Sandisk drive or just do both on the Sandisk?

3. How would I format all my hard drives? Via the Windows installation when installing the OS or in Windows?

4. In the Power options under turn off hard disk after x amount of minutes, does that spin down all my hard drives or just the 1TB WD Blue? As I heard it is bad for the SSD?

Many thanks!

1. No, but neither software will service the other SSD. You might want to just keep them around for a bit and chuck them once you're done.

2. It doesn't matter what you do in this scenario.

3. When you are installing the OS, if all the drives are unformatted, I would find it best to format only the OS drive, then use the disk manager in Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage to format the rest. The only reason I suggest this is to avoid the Windows installer thinking you want to install Windows on the other disks and create bootloader partitions for them (they don't take up much space, but they would be annoying to have)

4. It shuts down all the drives or at least puts them in a sleep mode, but that's not bad for an SSD (otherwise it'd be bad for an HDD too)