Is there a performance difference between installing your programs and software in C drive and other drives?

Question

I have a Dell Inspiron 5547 (running Windows 10), and I have 250 GB on my C: drive and ~110 GB on my D: and E: drive. I was wondering if there is any difference between installing programs on my C: drive and installing them in D: or E: drive?

I've heard that installing programs in the C: drive can sometimes slow down the computer. Is that true?

Answer 1

Any performance boost comes mostly from having two physical drives.

Assuming that drive A (with your C: partition and OS) and drive B (with another partition e.g D: or E:) are roughly equivalent drives in terms of hardware specs and connections, running things from drive B could potentially be faster if drive A is busy or heavily fragmented.

That said, there are a number of caveats:

• This is likely more applicable to regular HDDs vs. SSDs for a variety of technical reasons.

• Drive specs and connections matter. A 250GB 5400 RPM HDD will not be as fast as a 500GB 7200 RPM HDD and thus may not yield desired results.

• SSDs basically beat regular HDDs for speed no matter what, especially with newer connection standards.

• If a program insists on installing some files on C: regardless of where the main files are stored, this may still have an impact on performance.

Being a bit old-school, I've always liked to have multiple hard drives and to separate things like you mention. But performance wise, it isn't a sure bet things will automatically be faster.

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Though it does not pertain to your question, one side benefit of installing programs on a separate partition or drive is that if e.g C: is trashed for some reason, your likelihood of important data retention goes up (depending on where programs store files).