I know that C drive is usually meant for the operating system while D Drive is used as the recovery, but seeing as how I have used about 80% of my C-drive memory but only about 5% of my D-drive, what would be the ramification of my installing big computer games (i.e., many gigabytes) in D instead of C? Any meaningful effect on the computer?
It’ll likely be faster, assuming you don’t have a slower drive for your D drive. Generally speaking, you don’t want things that need quick loading on your OS drive because the computer has to spend time loading OS stuff and game stuff through the same port and on the same platters, which is slow. It usually doesn’t matter (and if your OS drive is an SSD and your non-OS drive an HDD the SSD is definitely faster), but it’s actually better to install off the main drive.
Now, this is true about 98% of the time. There are some things, including a few games, that really, really, really hate living off the C drive. Most applications will be fine, but every once in a while you’ll meet one that rebels. For instance, a lot of the Assassin’s Creed PC games will crash without any sensible error message if not installed on the C drive. Ubisoft games are the only ones I know of that do this. There are some applications that fail too, but they’re usually free internet applications that haven’t been torture tested properly.
You also want to keep anything like driver software on your OS drive.
Other than that you can put anything you want on your D drive. You can even ask windows to put your Documents/Pictures etc on an off-drive, my Z: drive (no I don’t have 26 drives, I just prefer the letter Z for historical reasons on previous computers I owned as a kid) is a 3TB HDD that I keep everything on, except very fast loading things which live on my SSD OS drive.
E: You mention a recovery drive. If it’s actually designated by Windows as a recovery partition/disk it’s probably a backup image of the C: drive, and you don’t want to try and write to it. If it’s just a normal drive it’s fine though.
That is assuming two physical drives, of course. It could be two logical partitions on the same drive, in which case none of that is true.
It should be fine to install and run things on D.
But if it’s two partitions on one physical drive, I would resize the disk partitions, or create a new partition for games.
I’ve had good results using MiniTool Partition Wizard. They have free version for home users, and as long as you don’t want to do anything fancy like changing the cluster size, it’s more than adequate.
You can reduce the size of D to a minimum, and increase the size of C. Or create a new partition, say F or whatever, for games.
If D is your recovery drive as the system came from the manufacturer, odds are it’s simply a tiny partition holding the software sufficient to restore the system to factory default. The question is not “how full?” but “how many Gigabytes free space?” If it’s the factory default restore, then maybe don’t mess with it.
If the two drives are simply partitions on one disk, then there’s no speed advantage to putting some stuff on the D: drive, but no downside. A mechanical hard disk uses an arm with a read-write head that swings back and forth to read tracks. Having to read say, a game, and also the operating system means the arm is swinging back and forth from one track to the other and reading a bit of both; arm movement is the slowest part of disk access (It’s not reading anything as it moves between tracks). If you configure a separate drive for your games, that would be faster. Also fast would be having more RAM (memory) so the necessary operating systems get read once and stay in memory, are not constantly reloading from disk.
In Windows, use Task Manager to see how much of your physical memory you are using. Resource monitor (resmon.exe) will dig deeper, telling you about memory and disk and CPU (and network) and how busy each is. Tuning is all about identifying the slowdowns. Reminds me of the Steve Martin routine, back in his early funny years, where he keeps adding more and more speakers to his audio system (stereo, quadrophonic, octophonic, duodecaphonic, then googlephonic) and the music still sounds like crap until… “maybe it’s the needle?” (A joke for you old folk…)
If it’s like most consumer grade computers, D: is for recovery and is on the same physical drive as C:. My advice is to leave D: alone unless you’re confident you can recover by yourself.
For more space on C:, you can uninstall software you rarely or never use, clear caches, and move media and data files to an external drive.
If D: drive is a restore partition (D: is not for restoration, though it could be) You could resize it using the proper utility, moving free space from D: to C:. This assumes they are both part of the same drive.
If you have a computer with two physical drives, not partitions, many manufacturers may set the C: as a SSD and D: as a HDD. SSDs will run things much faster, but are more expensive per GB. If they are both the same type, it may be a good idea to install on D.
OP do you know exactly what you have? If not perhaps someone could clarify to the OP exactly how to determine exactly what he has?
For example OP in the Start box type
Disk
Then click on the option
Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions
If at the bottom half you see
Disk 0 which includes both C and D then you have C and D occupying two logical partitions on one physical disk and your best approach is to resize–make D smaller and C larger. So OP tell us what you see there.
A small number of applications still, even today! assume that they are installed on the c: drive and insist on leaving some stuff there. A much smaller, tiny number of applications assume they are installed on the c: drive, and get confused when they are not. I haven’t seen that for years.
I always install games and big things on the D: drive when using a modern computer where the D drive is slower and larger than the C drive. I also, at home, shift parts of the user profile from the small ssd C drive to the large spinning D drive. That’s because, at home, the SSD’s are small, and people drop movies onto their desktop: at work, SSD’s are large, and people don’t leave large a/v files on their desktop.