Well, I am obviously not a developer, but I've worked long enough around developers to know operating systems are smart enough to easily manage, control, and keep track of the locations of installed programs and the components of those programs - wherever they are stored. So I'll stick with my accusation that insisting programs be installed on the boot drive is just lazy programming. The loader information can go in the Registry - that's one of it's primary purposes. And while the Registry is also used to replace .ini files, they are still used quite a bit for such things. I note there are over 900 .ini files on my C drive. Or a program could just have a small loader program on C and keep the bulk of its files on another drive or even in "the cloud" like Office 365 does. "Workstations" in organizations do this all the time with the bulk of the program kept on file servers. So I know it can be done.
In looking at the
system requirements for Visual Studio, it says a typical installation is 30 - 50GB, but depending on added features, could be as high as 210GB! That's huge, but no where does it say that space must be on Drive C. In any case, if that is the worst offender, and unless you have all the added features, it seems it could still work for you if most of the other apps were put on D.
But it is not my place to tell you what to do here. And maybe you have other plans for that 256GB SSD. I'm just offering what I think is a viable, easier (and safer) solution than cloning and replacing your current SSD. I note my C drive is a 256GB SSD that provides 237GB of useable storage (after formatting). Installed on this disk is 64-bit Windows 10 Pro and Office 2016 Home and Business (which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint Outlook and OneNote) as the two biggest space hogs. Also on this drive is Malwarebytes Premium, SAS, FF, PM, Chrome, Foxit Reader, MailWasher Pro, CCleaner, Macrium Reflect, TurboTax, and a host of other smaller installed programs. And of course, all my hardware drivers, and the Page File. Plus my Documents folder is on C and it alone takes up 4.74GB of the 13.4GB my C:\Users\Bill folder uses.
As seen here, there is still plenty of space.
And for sure, I could have put Office and most if not all of those installed apps, and my Documents and Downloads folders, and my Page File on my D drive, if I needed the extra space. And it is simple to configure most apps to save data files, by default, on secondary or tertiary drives.
That said, these days, replacing the boot drive is a fairly simple task. In fact, your new drive may even come with a utility for that - if not, the maker probably has one on their website. While I have had clones that failed, the cloning process has never damaged the source drive so rolling back always restored me to the point before I started the migration process. Nothing lost but time. And maybe I am being the lazy one here but for me, simply adding a secondary drive, ensuring my boot drive is untouched, is just a whole lot easier (and safer) than migrating every thing over to a new drive. Plus you don't lose that original 256GB of space - you are adding more space to it. And again, since this is a PC and not notebook, adding drives is pretty easy.
