Will installing a program on a secondary hard drive help the program run faster?

Question

I just came across a spare hard drive that I am thinking about putting in my computer. I currently have AutoCAD installed on my computer. I am wondering if I would install my secondary hard drive and then uninstall AutoCAD from my computer and re-install it to my secondary hard drive if that will help the program run faster.

Answer 1

Probaly not a great deal - the most benefit would be gained by using the extra drive as the home for your swap file, also known as virtual memory in WIndows.

Having the app on the other drive might help it open more quickly, but once the app is open it is mainly stored in memory, and will only access the drive occasionaly if it needs to access more code.

Your system will use the swap file / virtual memory as slow speed RAM, and a large program like autocad may end up with a large amount of the program stored in virtual RAM. Putting that on a seperate drive means that swap file access will never have to wait for other disk operations that occur on you system drive to finish.

Answer 2

Not necessarily.



If the second hard drive is faster, it may help load times slightly, but in general, you won't see much of a difference. Autocad hits your CPU/GPU/memory much harder than your HDD (typically).

Answer 3

It won't make a difference unless the hard drive's RPM is faster (barely noticeable) or it's a Solid State SSD type drive (noticeable).