HOW TO move user data from mSATA SSD to HDD (hard disk) [ Edited ]

[JNavas]

The recommended way to use mSATA SSD and conventional hard disk drive (HDD) together is:

• SSD for OS and programs
• HDD for user data

Windows places user profiles on the system drive and doesn't give you a good way to move them, but fortunately there is a very good free software tool available that makes it easy: Profile Relocator. The best way to use it is to:

1. Install Windows as a temporary user
2. Run Profile Relocator to copy user profiles from SSD to HDD
3. Create a permanent user (which will be created on HDD)
4. Log out of the temporary user and in to the permanent user
5. Delete the temporary user (and temporary user files)

To maximize performance, I then created a directory for temporary files on the SSD (C:\temp), and pointed the TEMP and TMP user environment variables to it.

Works great! Highly recommended!

See Profile Relocator documentation for more details.

[alex65]

Good post!

It is also possible to keep your settings/temp files on your system drive/SSD (because in some applications like photoshop or firefox, you greatly enhance performance by having it on the ssd) and simply move the data folders (Music, doc, downloads) to the hard drive.

Windows has this built in, no need for a third party app or a temporary profile or symlinks.

Go to your home folder, right click on Documents/Downloads/Music/etc, select properties and choose the Location tab. 

[someotherguy]

Some great info in this thread.  I personally prefer moving only the libraries (by using the "location" tab in the library folder properies) and not the entire user profile (by using something like profile redirector), but either one gets the job done.

In the future I think you will see more advanced software that stores everything (OS, apps, and data) on the HDD, and treats the mSATA SSD as a huge cache.  I'm not sure the power user would prefer this, as opposed to managing the SSD + HDD themselves with the tips in this thread.  But the caching solution would definitely help get the best possible performance to the masses who might not be able to get the same result themselves.

[JNavas]

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alex65 wrote:

Good post!

It is also possible to keep your settings/temp files on your system drive/SSD (because in some applications like photoshop or firefox, you greatly enhance performance by having it on the ssd) and simply move the data folders (Music, doc, downloads) to the hard drive.

[snip]

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Have you actually tried it both ways? Because I have, and got the best overall performance (even with Photoshop CS5) from the method in my original post, with user profile (without temp) on HDD, and with OS, programs, and temp on SSD.

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someotherguy wrote:

Some great info in this thread.  I personally prefer moving only the libraries (by using the "location" tab in the library folder properies) and not the entire user profile (by using something like profile redirector), but either one gets the job done.

In the future I think you will see more advanced software that stores everything (OS, apps, and data) on the HDD, and treats the mSATA SSD as a huge cache.  I'm not sure the power user would prefer this, as opposed to managing the SSD + HDD themselves with the tips in this thread.  But the caching solution would definitely help get the best possible performance to the masses who might not be able to get the same result themselves.

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Caching is certainly simpler, but Windows ReadyBoost doesn't work terribly well, and putting user profiles on HDD has the additional advantage of making it easy to reinstall the system or move the data drive to a different system while preserving user profiles and all the time and effort invested in setting them up. I think we'll see just SSD in the reasonably near future, but in the meantime I prefer partitioning OS and programs onto mSATA SSD and user profiles (data) onto HDD.

[Zekexz]

I've used the relocator for two other newly installed desktops already, it's one awesome program. However this time when using the relocator I get a warning saying that windows considers the new location to be a virtual drive. How do I change that??

[JNavas]

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Zekexz wrote:
I've used the relocator for two other newly installed desktops already, it's one awesome program. However this time when using the relocator I get a warning saying that windows considers the new location to be a virtual drive. How do I change that??

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Use Disk Management to see what kinds of drives you have.