Just installed a Solid State Drive on my laptop that has 2 drive bays. Moved the HDD over to the 2nd bay, and put the operating systems and applications (Chrome, Office, CCleaner, etc.) on the SSD. I'd like to clean up the HDD with CCleaner, but have it ignore the SSD. I'm going to be moving things like Temp Internet Files to the HDD (if I can ever figure it out, but that's for another forum), and a few other things I'd like occasionally use CCleaner for.
Is there a way to do this?
I am a little confused by what you want, so I am going to simply answer this question based on assumptions I am making from the question you presented here.
You purchased a Solid State drive & want to move the temp files/internet temp files etc to another drive so that you can prevent as much wear as possible on the Solid State Drive, & reduced fragmentation since I am assuming that Defraggler cannot handle a Solid State Drive.
I will show you how to do some of what you asked, but here are things you might like to consider before beginning.
- Solid State drives are guaranteed for 10 years in many cases, as opposed to 3 to 5 with magnetic based.
- Due to wear leveling control on SSD, I see no need to worry about shortened lifespan. Magnetic drives also lose life as they have a Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) rating. Either drive is going to die one day. Some make the case that defragging a SSD drive shortens its lifespan, but I make the case that defragging shortens the life of ANY drive you use it on. Even the magnetic media based ones, since they have Mean Time Before Failure ratings & any use of the drive shortens that time. Of course the benefit of occasional defragmentation is faster file access with less CPU overhead which reduces strain on your system. I would make that same case for SSD, but some people here feel differently concerning that.
- It can be argued that SSD are more reliable, but I feel leery trusting all my important data files to a SSD drive since magnetic drives have platters that the data can be recovered if necessary by sending them off to a data recovery lab. I am not sure at this point if a SSD drive can be recovered if they die, or if the data is just gone.
To move the internet cache files to the old drive, you can open up your Internet Explorer browser, then go to Options. It may be listed differently across different versions of IE, so just look for Tools/Internet Options, or an Options button as in IE9 etc. Under the Temporary Internet Files may be listed Settings or something similar. From here, you can change the folder to another drive if necessary. There are different versions of Windows, but if you wanted to set your swap file to another drive to save wear, you can also do this from under XP by right clicking My Computer/Properties/Advanced. Then, under Performance, click settings. Click Advanced tab, then click under virtual memory where it says Change to change the paging file. I have found hibernation to be a mixed bag, with it working fine on some systems but not on others. Resume time typically takes nearly as long as a reboot. Sometimes, however, hibernation causes problems or even a crash. What seems to work nearly as good, is to use standby. It resumes quick & doesn't seem to cause any problems. Think of it as a lighter sleep state. If you do not find hibernation of any help to you, I would disable it under the power options in the Control Panel as this can take up 1 GB space or more on some systems.
Next, set CCleaner to empty the contents of the Internet Temporary files folder that you moved earlier under the section where you can add custom folders to clean. Then, to get it to ignore the SSD drive you are on, simply uncheck everything you want it to ignore. You should be able to, well, get it to ignore pretty much everything! Under advanced settings, get it to remember the settings to an INI file instead of the registry. You will want to leave the checkmark for CCleaner to clean the IE folder on the other drive, if you still want to do that.
What I would ask myself if I were you, is whether this is what you want. Moving your temp files to another drive that is slower will slightly decrease your system performance. It will also cause your computer CPU & subsystems to have to wait longer on read/write cycles causing them greater wear as they are in use longer waiting for things to get done.
Personally, if it were me, I would just let windows handle the swap file & the internet temp folders on the SSD drive as that is a lot faster than a normal drive & I just cannot see the benefit of using another drive to offset those to. The lifespan of a normal SSD is enough that it should be comparable to a normal drive "death" anyway, so I just don't see the advantage of slowing down your system to "prevent wear".
I would use a magnetic disk based drive for external imaging/important files since those actually have a physical platter that can be sent to data recovery labs if the write head crashes for instance. I would use the SSD for normal computing purposes. And I would have CD/DVD backup of that in case something went wrong.
I hope this answers all the questions you have, but if it doesn't, please feel free to ask more.
Regards,
Don
Edit: Some systems will automatically reboot when you click the Move button in Internet Explorer for the temp files. As of now, I am not certain if this is because they try to move the folder while it is in use (internet browsers open?), or if it pertains to the version of IE or Windows they are using.
Be certain that all internet browsers are closed & run CCleaner before beginning. It may be a better option to avoid opening IE altogether when attempting to move the folder, & just go to the Control Panel instead. Use the Internet Options in the control panel to avoid opening an IE window while moving.
Make sure you are done with whatever file(s) you have open before proceeding so that if Windows does reboot, you will not lose anything. Thank you!