The idea is to have your operating system installed on the fast drive (the SSD or the Raptor). Any program files, games, applications you install will be stored here and run from here. You take advantage of a really fast read/write, while not wasting money on space that you won't be using.
Then, you get another drive strictly for storage media. This way you can get a cheap 1TB+ drive. Personally I like the WD Caviar Greens cause they run quiet, cool, and power efficient. This won't effect performance of your computer.
The way I have it set up is I have a 10,000RPM WD raptor for my OS, and I have 2 x 1TB WD Caviar Blacks set up in a RAID 0 to make a 2TB drive, and I back that up with a 2TB external.
so is the 2-drive strategy as simple as: (1) SSD contains operating system + virtual machines + most used applications, (2) large HDD contains pictures, videos, etc. or do you want to split up what your accessing, e.g. SSD contains visual studio application and HDD contains visual studio projects? – Edward Tanguay – 2009-10-25T20:34:59.873
With an SSD it's blurred, as there's no read-lag, and they're bloody fast, but for relatively small things like a VS project it probably doesn't much matter. – Phoshi – 2009-10-25T20:37:43.160
You probably don't have more than several megs of source code (actual compilable code, not counting assets like images, etc) unless it's an extremely large project. I wouldn't see a need to split up the VS executable and the project onto separate disks - I'd keep them both on the SSD, as Visual Studio's I/O needs are surely not going to surpass what your SSD is capable of providing. – John Rose – 2009-10-26T16:37:06.267
For a "typical" Windows developer, if there is such a thing, you should be able to fit just about all of your essentials on even a 60GB SSD.
On my 60GB SSD I have Win7 Ultimate, Office 2K7, VS2005, VS2008, a 20GB VMWare virtual machine running Win2003, Photoshop CS4, a number of miscellaneous smaller applications, and 5GB of games. And there's still 5GB left over.
I was able to do this by moving the paging and hibernate files to a larger drive (8GB saved right there) and using NTFS compression on most of C:\Program Files and C:\Program Files(x86) which saved several GB. – John Rose – 2009-10-26T16:42:04.730