Moving all Graphic Programs to a Separate Drive?

GA
Posted By
Gordon_Anderson
May 23, 2004
Views
340
Replies
8
Status
Closed
Hello all. I have Windows XP on an IBM NetVista with about 60 GB and about 630 MB of RAM. Not being knowledgeable on the hardware size at all I was looking at buying a separate, stand alone 40 GB Hard drive from Lacie and put all of my graphics program on it. Currently I have Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, Indesign 2.02, and Acrobat Professional. My files are usually not extreme in size. But I still wondered if this would be a good way (for less than $300) to assure that my graphics programs don’t muck up my other computer functions and vice versa. Any thoughts would be appreciated. And… would moving the programs to this separate drive be hard to do.

Thanks,

Gordon

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B
BobLevine
May 23, 2004
I keep all my programs on one partition, the O/S on another and the data on one more. If you add a second harddrive, use it for a scratch disk. You’ll get more benefit out if it that way.

Bob
GA
Gordon_Anderson
May 23, 2004
Thanks Bob. And is the Scratch disc basically just like a back up source of space then, available to all partitions?

Gordon
DP
Daryl_Pritchard
May 23, 2004
Hi Gordon,

I take a similar approach as Bob, with my O/S and all lesser apps and system utilities on the boot partition (C), primary programs on the 2nd partition, Windows data folders (Favorites, My Documents, etc.) and all other "primary" data on a 3rd partition, Windows Temp and pagefile on the 1st partition of my 2nd drive, and the Photoshop scratch disk on the 1st partition of my 3rd drive (I’ve got 4 drives total). The scratch disk for Photoshop need not be the full 2nd drive, but rather just a "small" partition of it, perhaps no more than 4GB. The remainder of that drive could indeed then be used as a backup source of space for storage of critical files. What I like to use my extra storage space for is system images for recovery needs and for copying installation files from CD onto the hard drive, for quicker installations. The latter can be readily given up if the need for more data storage arises.

While there are programs designed to facilitate moving an installed application from one partition to another, I’m not sure how well they work. Norton CleanSweep has such functionality in it, as does a Power Quest utility whose name escapes me. I’ve used both in the past but that has been several years ago and I think I found that neither performed the task as cleanly as I hoped. Since then I take the brute force approach of uninstalling the app and then reinstalling it to the new location. I feel that the extra trouble and time taken with such an approach is worth the assurance that all files are were they need be.

Having said that, there have been times that I have also just tried out moving a program’s installation folder from one partition to another and then tried running the program. There have been several instances where the shortcut to the program would err out and have to be repaired but, once done, the program would appear to launch and run successfully. Actually, I think that was true of Photoshop at one point in time, but I’m not sure if that would work any more. If you should try such an approach, keep in mind what you’ve done so that you can return the folder to the original location if failures are seen, then uninstall the app normally and reinstall it to the new partition.

Hope that helps,

Daryl
L
LenHewitt
May 23, 2004
Gordon,

And is the Scratch disc basically just like a back up source of space
then, available to all partitions?<<

The ‘Scratch Disk’ is for Photoshop’s use only and can be located anywhere, but having a partition dedicated to it and on a different physical drive to the Windows pagefile improves performance.
GA
Gordon_Anderson
May 23, 2004
Thanks so much for the advice Len and Daryl.
L
LenHewitt
May 23, 2004
You’re welcome, Gordon
DP
Daryl_Pritchard
May 23, 2004
Gordon,

Glad to help. One thing I might add is that I don’t suggest the idea of partitioning drives is necessarily a good one, particularly not to the extreme I take it. I like it from an organizational standpoint, but it really fell out from my "old days" of running a dual-boot PC where I wanted certain data and applications to be shared between the two boot configurations. Performance-wise, I don’t know if there’s any advantage in having programs installed to a separate partition from the O/S, but I also doubt there’s much of a disadvantage either. It sounds as though your idea of installing your apps to the 2nd drive is more just a matter of "comfort" for you, which is somewhat how I feel. Also, by keeping the system partition smaller, since the apps are off-loaded to another partition, routine defragmenting is much quicker for the system partition while less often needed for the programs partition.

Daryl
WK
William Kazak
May 27, 2004
I don’t know how you can feel safe when the registry entries are on the C drive and your programs are on a separate HD. If you remove that HD the programs won’t work because they need the registry entries which were established when the programs were originally installed.

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