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I've already allocated about 12GB for the C: drive system restore. I noticed while setting it up that there is also a D: drive.

This is my first time seeing a D: drive and it's on the Acer laptop I just got. From what I can tell it doesn't really have anything inside. Yes I've made sure to have it show me hidden folders and there was msdownld.tmp which I deleted since it's just an empty download temporary folder.

The D: drive is also taking up most of the space and downloading stuff still going into the C: drive.

hard drives

From what I've been able to find on forums is that it's not important and I should just merge the D: drive back into the C: drive. I agree with this but I wanted a little advice before I do so. Don't want to accidentally break something.

Update: I've also looked at disk management and it seems the recovery drive is not in the D: drive before anyone asks that.

disk management

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It looks to me that your laptop has actually 2 drives (this is not unusual in mid-range to high-end laptops):

  • A fast 120 GB SSD that is home to C:, the recovery partition and the EFI partition (that 100 MB thing)
  • A 1 TB regular harddisk (D:) which is slow (compared to the SSD) but which has a lot of space to store whatever you want.

You can't really merge the 2 drives together (actually you can by making it a hybrid disk, but that is very tricky and not something I would recommend).

Simply install extra software on D:.
You can also re-locate "Documents", "Downloads", "Pictures", "Music" and "Videos" standard folders easily to D: so they won't fill up the C: drive.
Simply right-click the "Documents" folder in File Explorer and select "Properties" from the menu. In the Properties windows is a Location tab where you can move it to D:.
Same procedure for the other standard folders.

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  • I'm glad I asked or I might have done something dumb. Forgot it says in the specs that it has an SSD since I got this laptop for gaming. Was kind of confused since I've never used a duel drive system before. Will be sure to use your relocate recommendation. Probably will also migrate the desktop as well since I have a lot I plan to migrate from my desktop. Thanks a lot.
    – BrainstormSurge
    Jul 31, 2019 at 20:46
  • Do NOT relocate the desktop folder. This will cause serious issues with all sorts of programs and Windows itself doesn’t like that either. If you are really keen on keeping lots of stuff on your desktop place the files/folders on D: and put shortcuts to them on your desktop. That gives a slight performance benefit as well because files/folders on the desktop get scanned by antivirus with high frequency. Scanning a shortcut is a lot faster than scanning a regular file/folder.
    – Tonny
    Aug 1, 2019 at 6:25
  • Ah. Okay. Good thing I haven't tried it yet as I've been a little busy. Thanks.
    – BrainstormSurge
    Aug 1, 2019 at 18:36

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