I have been searching the forums for ways to move the C:\Users and C:\ProgramData folder to another drive for data security and what little performance gains it may give. The two most common methods I see are:
- moving the folders using robocopy and creating symbolic links to the new folder
- moving the folder and editing the registry to point to the new folder D:\Users instead of C:\Users.
None of the posts I found have discussed the benefits and drawbacks of each though. Sym links seems to be the easier method, but I would think the registry edit would be the better method.
I have used the sym links on my last machine and it worked fine, almost all of the time. There were a few softwares that just would not run and there were a few seemingly random quirks of the machine.
Which method would be least likely to cause other issues and least likely to cause some software to not work. Which would be the best for performance?
I found a couple topics for previous versions of windows, but not sure they still apply.
Moving users folder on Windows Vista/7 to another partition
what are the commands to redirect a subfolder of C:\ProgramData to D:\ProgramData