Should I spread the load of my games onto 2 different hard drives or fill one up and then go onto the next?

[handsomepigeon]

If I spread the load, will that make them last longer/run faster? Or are the effects negligible and I should just use the other hard drive once my first one has filled up?

 

[USAFRet]

If I spread the load, will that make them last longer/run faster? Or are the effects negligible and I should just use the other hard drive once my first one has filled up?

Assuming you're talking about spinning drives and not SSD's, doesn't really matter either way.

 

[cryoburner]

It shouldn't have any major effect on how long they will last, but performance near the beginning of a mechanical hard drive's available space will tend to be faster than near the end. As you get to near the end of the drive's space (the inner tracks of the platter), sequential performance will get down to almost half of what it was around the first half of the drive, so any games that happen to be located there may be prone to having somewhat longer load times. Here's a random HDTach screenshot showing this effect...

http://lab501.ro/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/sata3_hdtach.JPG

In this example, sequential performance near the beginning of the drive was around 140 MB/s, while near the end, it curved off to around 70 MB/s. This is because a drive can fit more data in each track in the larger outer tracks that the drive starts with, and can therefore read more data per revolution of the platter. Depending on how a game is coded, that could potentially have a notable effect on load times. So, you're likely to get better load times on some of your games with them located on the first half of two drives, compared to the beginning to end of one drive, assuming the drives are defragmented and all game files are move near the beginning of the available space.