Mulling over SSD(s) for new build

Champ

Hi all,
Trying to decide between the following options:
(A) 40 GB seperate SSD for Windows 7 (incl few apps) + 80 GB seperate SSD for Games

(B) 120GB single SSD for Windows 7 + Games

My thoughts:
(A) Is more expensive but I like keeping the OS ona seperate drive for maintenance purposes (HDD habit)

(B) Is cheaper and faster

Comments?

Serephucus

I'm the same way. I have my games/apps and OS seperate.

That raises an interesting point though: my games drive is a 1TB drive, with about 35% free. Are you sure you can fit all your games on 80GB? I know I bloody well can't.

The only reason I have mine seperate though is that I got an SSD when they were still on the expensive side. My 32GB one cost me €100. If I could afford one big enough for my OS and apps, I'd just shove them all on the one (and partition it, probbably).

If size isn't an issue, I'd vote for a partitioned second option. If you realise that you do in fact have more than 80GB of games, I'll look into a Momentus XT from Seagate. Gets around 1/2 the speed of a good SSD, best-case.

hi.im.fred

Option A!

DjFlin

Why not get the 120GB drive, and make two partitions, 40GB for OS and 80GB for games?

BigEejit

I have a boot drive SSD an games SSD. Works great, both are the 64GB variety, one is my old samsung one (not great speed wise, 80MB/s) and my boot/application drive is a Corsair F60 ....

Is 40GB too small for windows 7 + some programs?

VenomIreland

Take a look at Intel's SRT technology, it uses the SSD as a cache, seems to be pretty good.

slave1

If it helps the decision process Amazon have a OCZ Vertex 2 at £155 delivered, that's a good price

Unregistered.

Why can't you just have one with two partitions? Regular backups / OS images will protect you in the event of a drive failure, but for everything else - maintenance etc - there would be no difference between having two drives vs two partitions. Also, the fact that you have one, larger capacity drive means that you'll have the benefit's of a larger SSD all around - e.g. faster read/writes and random accesses, things like that.

cherryghost

I have a 60GB SSD with Windows 7 and programs on it (not including games)

Runs like a beast, though I almost had run out of space as the .msi installers bloated the thing up, it almost dragged down to a halt when it was under 2GB. Back up to 25GB free now and cold boot to desktop takes about 14 seconds, open programs are almost instantaneous

Games on an SSD make virtually no difference in its performance, and about 5% in its loading times, so personally I wouldn't bother with an SSD for gaming at all.

But if you really wanna go through with it, Option B

Champ

Thanks for the replies folks.
Always good to know how other people would do it / have done it and why.

I'm very particular about what games I play and usually don't have too many installed at any given time. I've only ever reached ~45 gigs max in terms of space used by games + saves.

As for why I was considering seperate SSDs as opposed to just partitioning well I was thinking that the theoratical Games SSD would wear out faster than its OS counterpart therefore when that occurs I wouldn't have to install the OS again at least (since it would have been ona seperate SSD mainly doing just reads).

As for those of you wondering would 40 gigs be enough for Windows 7, I did some googling and apparently it is assuming you don't have many apps that are space hogs.

SRT is interesting and I am planning on getting a z68 motherboard though no actual plans to use SRT.

Apart from the actual performance boost of SSDs I'm also after their cool and quiet attributes.;)

Anyways looks like I'm settling for just the one big SSD a.k.a option B. Thanks again.:)

Serephucus

I can confirm that 40GB is plenty for a Win7 install. I've got mine on a 32GB drive, along with 5GB of Users crap, and a few other bits and pieces, with about 7GB left.

RE SSD wear and tear: I think it was Anandtech, but one of the sites did a few tests to figure out how long an SSD would actually last, if you pretty much just treated it as a normal drive. From what I remember, it was one of the earlier SSDs, and they just stuck an OS and programs and whatever else on it... long story short, they estimated about five years, so I don't think you have to worry.

Unregistered.

Serephucus wrote: »

RE SSD wear and tear: I think it was Anandtech, but one of the sites did a few tests to figure out how long an SSD would actually last, if you pretty much just treated it as a normal drive. From what I remember, it was one of the earlier SSDs, and they just stuck an OS and programs and whatever else on it... long story short, they estimated about five years, so I don't think you have to worry.

This, though as far as I recall, he was doing above the average amount writes per day than a normal user would (due to his non-stop work environment) and that was calculated based on an SSD which quoted 3000 p/e cycles. Not sure what size it was.

CullyA

just be wary of some issues with vertex 2's

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?86056-Info-regarding-64Gbit-drives-that-did-not-meet-IDEMA-specifications.

slave1

I have a 60gig SSD in my HTPC, 55.8gig available, all I have installed is W7 64bit, XBMC, Firefox and some codecs and my primary drive is showing just 18.1gig free. Being honest I can't remember whether the W7 is an upgrade on top of Vista or not, anyhow you can see how much space is required.