Should I put my operating system on my fast drive or my slow drive?

I have a computer that I use mostly to play video games. I have a 10,000 rpm raptor and a 7,200 rpm regular drive. I plan on installing my OS on 1 drive and the game I play mostly on another. Would I have better performance and load times for my game if I install the OS on the faster drive, or would it be better to install the game on the faster drive?

Solution 1:

Apps and OS go on the fast drive, all documents and data (especially media) goes on the slow drive. This partly because of file sizes. Applications are typically smaller than the collective documents and files that they work on. The extreme case of this is video playback software, where the application, including all associated resources is less than 100MB. An individual video could be a couple hundred MB to several GB. Since VelociRaptors peak at about 600GB and standard drives basically start at 500GB now a days, it's very likely that your regular drive is much larger than the raptor.

You're basically trading fast start times for the OS and apps in exchange for slightly slower document and file opening. And if your games reside on the fast drive, you'll benefit from slightly better level load times (although in my case, my bottleneck seems to be somewhere other than my drives).

Solution 2:

I would recommend that you install the game on the 7,200 RPM drive, and the operating system on the 10,000 RPM drive...This way, your operating system and write and read data faster, so it can thus run the game more efficiently...

Besides, you can take advantage of the faster hard drive in more ways if your OS is installed on it...