How do I make my boot hdd as constant-work-free as I can?

[Bestuck]

Hi. I'm not a native English speaker so I apologize in advance for any mistake.

So the thing is my parents bought me an AIO 3 years ago. A year after, the hdd (wd 500gb blue) started to fail, so I bought a new one (same 500gb blue). A year after, same old story but not so many errors as before. I sold the pc and with some savings I build my current humble rig: g630 + amd 7750 + kingston value 4gb + h61 + 19' 1366*768 -I'm from Argentina and prices are a lot higher than USA, that's all I could afford. It's still enough because I game OK in high with medium filters and I watch a lot of TV shows, so gaming is not that important-.

Anyway, I'm using the first hdd that came 3 years ago in the AIO (which, by the way, spent a lot of time collecting dust), not the new one I bought, that one went with the pc. So far, it's been almost 9 months and no errors or BSOD's. I also recycled an old 2.5" 120gb hdd from a used notebook.

The thing is, the boot drive is the 500gb blue. I use a lot of p2p downloads and, adding my not so great internet connection, it's a big plus for me leaving the pc 24/7. However, I don't let it turned on more than 50 hours, just for precaution.

Now, better safe than sorry. I would like to do some optimizations as they do to ssd, such as move temp and page folders to the other drive (now used as backup, so it's not important). I don't like to have my hdd working all the time in everything, it's old by now, while I have the secondary hdd doing nothing but storage. I get lost and it's not very helpful all the guides and how-to's on ssd.

My question: Any suggestion on using the boot hdd to just read and do nothing else but download, and have the secondary hdd for cache, temp, tmp, browser cookies, and everything requiring constant writing?

I don't want a complete guide step-by-step, just the things I have to do. I mean, what to do, what folders or process are all the time using my hdd?

Thank you so much for your help.

 

[Elixer]

Ever heard the saying, your chasing your tail ?

HDs are mechanical, so they will fail at some point.
Trying to limit writes/reads is silly.
It would be much better to have backups, so when the HD does fail, then you won't be SOL.

Doing anything else is just extra work for nothing.

 

[kmmatney]

I did something similar a while back when I got my first SSD, using a RAM drive for temp files. That was nice, becuase the RAM drive was very fast. However it was a lot of work, and Google chrome never worked right with it, so now I just write all temp files to the SSD, and don't worry about it. Anyways, you can find some steps here to move the windows tmep folder and IE temp folder:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...-another/19f13330-dde1-404c-aa27-a76c0b450818

Your older hard drive is probably much slower, so you might see a degradation in performance. You shouldn't have any trouble keeping the WD Blue on all the time, but I hguess it wouldn't hurt to have it spin down once in a while.

 

[Bestuck]

Great, thanks. I know the older one is probably a lot slower but, all it would be doing is writing temp folder, while the blue is doing that plus keeping all the programs running (I tend to multitask quite a bit).

I'm gonna do that kmmatney, thanks.

 

[Drsignguy]

Ever heard the saying, your chasing your tail ?

HDs are mechanical, so they will fail at some point.
Trying to limit writes/reads is silly.
It would be much better to have backups, so when the HD does fail, then you won't be SOL.

Doing anything else is just extra work for nothing.

I agree. And to also add, Ssd's fail too...someday So backups are a must no matter what you use.

 

[Nothinman]

I agree. And to also add, Ssd's fail too...someday So backups are a must no matter what you use.

And when they fail they're a lot more difficult to get the data back so backups are that much more important.

 

[Bestuck]

Great. I'll start backing up right away then. Thank you all for helping me.