Originally Posted by
javabytes
I’m not sure how exactly it’s extra work, beyond equipping the machine with a second drive in the first place. I’ve never stored files in My Documents or any of the other predefined folders that would normally go on the system drive, so I don’t do any work to remap them. I think iTunes might be the one piece of software I had to do a symbolic link for. I suppose if it’s a shared machine it’s more work to get everyone on board with that kind of approach though.
I'm not entirely sure either. About the only additional work I do when I rebuild my box is that I disconnect my data drive before and re-attach it after the rebuild to ensure that I don't do the dumb thing and take out my data drive (doesn't actually matter because I'd have backups but still)
Originally Posted by
javabytes
Maybe my storage volume has forced my approach. On a laptop, I’m of the opinion that everything should be SSD these days, but on a desktop PC, I use SSDs for the OS and a limited set of files that materially benefit from the technology, and massive hard drives for most file storage since $/TB at the scale I’d need to actually store everything is prohibitive in SSDs.
I agree with the desktop but with a proviso... I cap the size of that drive to 4Tb. The main reason being if the drive fails, then I'm not spending too much time getting back up. The critical stuff first and get up and running. Then the not so important stuff gets copied over dinner or overnight. But I don't want to spend too much time doing a restore.
For laptops, one of my must haves is a second HDD/SSD slot (2.5 or m.2,). If it's m.2 and nvme, then I will limit that to 1Tb (and that's already expensive enough).