split Linux and windows to new hard drives?

[Gaogier]

Hello

Some of you may know that I had built my Gaming pc, on advice from you guys, and I now have what I think is a good PC, the price of which I brought slightly better hardware and ran out of money for windows 10. So I installed Linux, so I can at least use my PC and play some Linux Games. I had one hard drive, of which I brought when upgrading my MacBook Pro some years before, it is only 120GB SSD. I was then given a windows 10 key from an old online friend, so I installed windows, but I didn't have another hard drive so I partitioned the hard drive so that I could run windows and Linux on the same systems hard disk.

Since then, I brought a 1TB HDD, and installed some halo games from the Xbox game pass, and then my nan died and she had a mini PC where I took her old hard drive and deleted everything on it via command prompt? I am used to calling it terminal as I am a mac user over windows by heart. Anyway its now installed into my pc with nothing on it.

Here is a list of my Hard Drives
120 SSD split into windows (80GB with 14GB free) and Linux (the other half of the hard drive, some 30GB)
1TB HDD, with my games on, currently 750GB free
500GB HDD, with nothing on it. 465GB free

Should I get another small SSD for windows, put Linux on a new small SSD, keep it together, put windows on the 500GB HDD or move Linux to the 500GB HDD? Is this an easy task or not?

 

[MaddMann]

Well, the good news is Linux is pretty compact. Most OS based on Linux only really need 20gb (4gb for the actual OS and 16gb free for updates and unpacking). Windows on the other hand, takes up about 20gb and it is recommended to leave at least 32gb free at any time. With that in mind, you could get away with doing two 60gb partitions, but it will be uncomfortable unless you strictly ensure everything is installed on other drives. All in all, I would generally suggest just picking 1 OS unless you need a separate OS for development purposes.

TLDR, either get a larger primary hdd, or go down to a single OS.

 

[Brian Boru]

I would get a 1TB SSD for Windows and games, both of which will benefit a lot from the SSD.

Alternatively put Linux of the 560GB HD, it's a lighter OS so it'll benefit a lot less from a SSD. Use the 120GB SSD for Windows & programs & smaller games, and your 1TB for larger games—but install the current big game to SSD whenever it'll fit.

 

[Gaogier]

I have this thread on toms hardware too, they said 120gb ssd for windows is too small.

 

[Brian Boru]

they said 120gb ssd for windows is too small

That's not true, Win10 needs minimum ~30GB, but you should give it more of course—some breathing room is always good on a disk. My current Windows folder is 27.5GB, but of course there are other folders Windows creates, eg Users.

Tom's guys were probably assuming you'd install some software apart from Windows, which is the natural thing to do. I have a lot of software on my system disk, so the disk is 160GB full—it's a 256GB SSD.

So 120GB for Windows is a lot more than it needs.