Windows 10: Should I Use An HDD or SSD Drive As The "Data Drive" With My Laptop?

Hello.

I hope everyone is staying healthy and safe!

I have a subjective (and yet induce elements of fact) question to ask you all.

Introduction: Having a Lenovo T510 legacy laptop that has an upgraded SATA III 500 GB SSD drive (from an older HDD drive) in the main physical drive bay. I also removed the factory optical DVD drive and purchased a drive bay caddy that I plan to place an HDD or SSD inside and use. Right now, my main physical drive bay that has my SATA III 500 GB SSD physical drive contains my Windows 10 Pro 64-bit operating system drive and my hidden Recovery Partition. I plan on storing on the drive bay caddy drive all my data folders (Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos, Downloads), my Windows desktop files and folders, backup image files from a reputable installed back imaging software, maybe some of my Windows 10 Pro 64-bit temp folders and files (that I clean on a routine basis), my Microsoft Office 2016 OneNote files and other office type files (.doc, .docx, .pdf, etc.), photos and small-sized videos (outside the Windows Pictures and Videos folder) I work on, and other things I am may add I have not considered yet. I may have to setup partition(s) on an HDD or SSD physical drive to accommodate these actions.

Reason: To get off my Windows 10 SATA III 500 GB SSD drive any files or folders that are being rewritten often to lessen the wear placed on my SSD drive currently and use another physical drive (SSD or HDD) with connections (folder and file associations) between the Windows 10 OS system drive on the SSD and the other drive (HDD or SSD) to store the data. [My Comment: Yes, I know SSD drives are more dependable and reliable today than in years past and are more durable; but having frequent reading and writing to another physical drive will naturally lessen to a greater extent any wear on the SSD drive containing my system drive. A little about me that should know -- I perform work on this laptop that places a high demand on a continual basis on reading and (re-)writing files of data (large and small capacities) to physical drives as some of them I have described above. I am considering the physical drive capacity of either another 500 GB or 1 TB too.]

Question: Based on the information I have provided you above, what physical drive type (HDD or SSD) would you recommend IN MY CASE AND WHY FOR MY DRIVE BAY CADDY for my "data files"? [Please reply with facts and opinions.]

Please reply.

Thank you!

:)

 

Confused about hard drives: HDD and SSD

Browsing through the Microsoft Store for a new pc, I see various hard drives listed, such as:

16GB eMMC

32GB eMMC

500GB 5400 RPM HDD

2GB DDR3L 1600 MHz

32GB SSD [?]

64GB SSD

I understand that solid state drives are good, though expensive. What I don't understand is what size of an SSD would be the equivalent of, say, a terabyte HD? It seems that 64GB is the largest SSD offered here. What size HDD would equal that capacity?

And, BTW, what is an eMMC?

 

SSD Drive as Boot Drive and HDD Drive as Storage, how do I do it?

Recently, I have discovered an old Kingston 120gb SSD Drive in my drawers. I own a Lenovo laptop with a HDD Caddy with a 1 Tb hard drive in the bay and the SSD installed internally inside the computer. My computer runs with Windows 10 Pro 64 bit.

My question is; How would I configure my SSD so that it will be the boot drive, and the HDD in the Caddy as the Storage drive? Since 120gb of space in the SSD ain't exactly 'much'.

 

SSD Drive as Boot Drive and HDD Drive as Storage, how do I do it?

Remove the HDD. Install Windows on SSD. Then insert the HDD. Now SSD should be your boot drive with HDD as a storage drive.

If Windows doesn't boot,

1) Check Boot priority in BIOS and set your SSD on top of the list.

2) If still doesn't work, then create a 200MB Fat32 partition on the HDD(call it whatever you want) then boot into the windows 10 installer via a usb, launch command prompt with SHIFT + F10 and run the following:

bcdboot C:\Windows /l en-en /s B: /f UEFI

where B: is the drive letter for the 200MB partition (it could be any other drive letter for you).

Note: the drive letter with windows could be different, so either poke around command prompt to find out or launch DISKPART and run show volumes to find the partition.

The only downside to this solution is that if the HDD fails you lose boot capabilities. To get around this you could create a ISO of the 200mb boot drive and upload it for safe keeping and burn it to a usb flash disk in case of emergencies.

Source: ENVY 15t-j000 mSATA SSD + HDD fresh install, with mSATA as boot
drive