WIN 10 Residing on M.2 Drive - Other Programs

SeaDot · 16 Jan 2020

Hello,
I am new. This is my first post. I am not a heavyweight Win 10 person. I ordered all the parts to have a custom build. It is all Corsair/ASUS/ and AMD Ryzen 5 2600x CPU. The build was performed by Frys Electronics, stress tested and ready to use.

Before I turn it all on I would like some help clarifying the Following:

1. My WIN 10 HOME, Version 1909 resides on a Samsung m.2 drive (250Gb) on the motherboard.
Question - Do all programs have to reside on the m.2 drive? Can they reside on one of my SSD drives that I have on this system? I am having a real problem understanding all this. Rather confusing.

My current/old system has a Segate 2Tb Hybrid HD C: drive and everything resided on that drive including the Windows 7 O/S. I currently run Office 365 and a myriad of other programs, from authoring to some very very lite CAD and Adobe stuff.

I need Professional help here. I thank you for helping me. This forum is quite the place for WIN 10. Impressive.

kipper · 16 Jan 2020

Welcome to the forums SeaDot...

If this is really an adventure you want to take then you might have a look here:

How to move programs files to another drive:

pparks1 · 17 Jan 2020

You can install other apps and programs to another drive on your system. You just have to choose the install location, which sometimes requires you to hit custom on the install.

Pejole2165 · 17 Jan 2020

Most software installations will give you the option to install to a different drive, this can keep the bulk of their files off the C:\ drive but there may still be files installed to C:\ in the Program Files, Program Files (x86), Users, and Program Data folders, these will normally be small files such as config and shared files.
It is possible to move the Users folders to another drive but it is harder to do this after Windows install.
Most applications will give the option of where to save files instead of using the defaults (Pictures, Documents etc), simply make your own folders for these files on a different drive and choose to save there, once done for the first time most software will remember this choice and use your chosen destination by default, until you change it again.
You could also look for Portable versions of software as these install no files.
It is not recommended to change the location of the Program Files and Program Files (x86) folders as you could completely break Windows.
The default folders shown in the Computer (Documents, videos etc) can be changed to another drive by right clicking and choosing the Location tab.
So you have several ways to keep files off the C:\ drive, but bear in mind, should the Windows install become corrupt and need re installing most of the apps on other drives may not work without a repair or re install as they may rely on files in the above mentioned folders or in the Windows registry.

dalchina · 17 Jan 2020

For normal use a 250Gb drive as your system drive should be quite large enough for programs you install. If you were installing a number of large games, for example, that could be a different matter.

Far better to keep personal data off the system partition (C:) and store that data elsewhere. Personally I do not recommend using the location tab to relocate Windows library folders (Documents, Videos etc) as horrible mistakes have been made by users in doing so. Using that with appropriate care and backing up beforehand (disk imaging) so you can recover is recommended in the tutorials here on that.

Rather create new folders on your other drives e.g. My media, My files and folders, My downloads etc and then add those to libraries if you wish.

If space saving on C: is a concern, there's an extensive tutorial on how do do that.