A reader asks: My PC has an SSD; will adding an old, slow HDD make my whole PC slow?

Nope — not if you’re smart about how you set it up!

Older, slower drives are great for medium-to-long-term data storage — files that you want to have handy and accessible, but that are not in constant use. Think of things like music, photo, or video collections; backup copies; system images; ISOs; and so on. The speed of the old/slow drive will only have an effect when you’re actively using the drive to write or read the files there. At other times, the drive will have zero effect.

That’s why the rule of thumb for multi-drive systems is to organize your files in a pecking-order based on drive speed: Make your fastest drive the C: or system drive, and set up the OS and your most used apps and files there (including the page/swap file, temp files, etc.). Place your least-frequently-accessed items on the slower/est drive.

In my own case, I have a speedy SSD drive in my Win10 PC as C:, with two 5TB external drives assigned higher letters. All my frequent-use stuff (OS, apps, user files, page/swap file, temp files, etc.) is on C:, with the two external drives used only for longer-term storage of music, videos, photos, File History, image backups, etc.

The USB-based external drives are much, much slower than the internal SSD, but it just doesn’t matter much in routine use: When the external drives aren’t actively reading or writing data (and that’s most of the time), they have zero effect on the rest of the PC.

(Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why external USB drive prices have fallen so low: Manufacturers know that their older/slower drive types and technologies can’t compete with SSDs as primary drives, but they’re still perfectly fine for use as inexpensive external secondary or tertiary drives. The manufacturers get to repackage and sell drives that otherwise might sit on the shelf, and we get cheap external storage!)

So go ahead and add as much slower storage as you need! Just make sure you keep your most-frequently-accessed files on your fastest drive.

Here are some tools you can use to know, definitively, what your drive speeds are:

● 10 Free Tools to Measure Hard Drive and SSD Performance:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/measure-actual-hard-disk-perfomance-under-windows/

● How to measure disk-performance under Windows
https://superuser.com/questions/130143/how-to-measure-disk-performance-under-windows

● Apps for measuring hard drive speed
https://www.google.com/search?q=apps+for+measuring+hard+drive+speed

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