Is there any way to store executables on an SSD, assets on a hard drive?

[micrometers]

It appears to me that most executables for programs, say, GTA4, are like 10 mb, while the bulk of the 10gb install is for art assets and the like.

Is there any way to store executables on a small SSD for fast loading, while keeping game assets on the larger hard drive?

 

[Emulex]

INTEL SRT or those "cache-accelerator" ssd's do it automatically. storage tiering. google ssd acceleration SRT and maybe velobit? i forgot their name. every caching ssd pretty much comes with the same software for non SRT folks.

It's not perfect 🙂

 

[Smoblikat]

What good would a quick access exe do if all the information its calling for loads slow?

 

[Cerb]

It appears to me that most executables for programs, say, GTA4, are like 10 mb, while the bulk of the 10gb install is for art assets and the like.

Is there any way to store executables on a small SSD for fast loading, while keeping game assets on the larger hard drive?

Maybe, but you'd find it will do no good. Executables are very quick to load as it is, as they are only a few files, usually big enough to hide seeking, and they tend to take a significant amount of time just setting up libraries and such. In fact, starting the new process on Windows can sometimes take significant amounts of human time. It's basically the cost of being able to run the same binaries with a different OSes and hardware configs.

So you'll have <50MB in 10-20 files loading fast, and staying in RAM until after you exit, and then >10GB in many thousands of files loading slow (and, these files are loaded, read, and discarded often).

The way to do it faster is to "waste" the <50MB and just put all of it on a SSD.

 

[Auric]

Junction Points allow data to be moved. A good proggy is:

http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm

 

[Nothinman]

It appears to me that most executables for programs, say, GTA4, are like 10 mb, while the bulk of the 10gb install is for art assets and the like.

Is there any way to store executables on a small SSD for fast loading, while keeping game assets on the larger hard drive?

As Aurica alludes to, you can do it with junctions, links and too much work however you end up defeating the purpose of an SSD. Even if the binary loads in a few ms you still have to wait for the textures and such so you'll still be waiting for the spindle drive to serve that up before the game starts, levels load, etc.

 

[BrightCandle]

Most games don't benefit from an SSD much if at all. They tend to have significant size files and they don't do many random seeks in the loading process. Often you'll find the loading is actually CPU limited rather than on the HDD. Moving one or two files off to the SSD isn't usually worth the bother.

There are some games that really benefit from being on an SSD (HL2, Arma 2, Shogun) but they are usually the PC specific ones.