Why do msi installations use slower drives over faster ones in windows 7?

Posted by Joshua C on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Joshua C
Published on 2012-06-25T00:13:29Z Indexed on 2012/06/25 3:18 UTC
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Filed under:

windows-7

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hard-drive

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installation

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msi

I have noticed that the slowest drive in my system is used most during an msi installation. I mainly notice this when running windows updates but it seems to be msi installs in general.

The setup I last saw this occur on was running Windows 7 with the following drives:
Sata:
240GB SSD NTFS ~515MB/s Operating system drive
1TB NTFS ~110MB/s
Firewire:
4TB ExFAT ~80MB/s

I would think that windows would choose the fastest drive with available space for temporary files. But it will instead choose the external drive with the slowest transfer speed. I could also understand choosing the 1TB for not being an ssd in an attempt to preserve the longevity of the ssd write capacity. Why does this happen? Is there a way to force these installations to use the OS drive or a specific drive?

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