SSD For OS?

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*Ç|®8tË<ETH>

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Hiya guys.............Im building a new rig, and its been while, and for me I see the latest is SSD. I heard a guy at Fry's telling someone that people are putting the OS on the SSD, and everything else on the Hard Drive?

Newegg has a 32gig or so SSD for $100 I think, so I can put just WinXp, and then every other app/games/music/vids on my Raptor?
 
*Ç|®8tË<ETH>;1035732350 said:
Newegg has a 32gig or so SSD for $100 I think, so I can put just WinXp, and then every other app/games/music/vids on my Raptor?
Click to expand...

I'd personally wait and see right now. Prices are just going to keep coming down, why buy a 32 GB SSD now when you'll probably be able to get a faster 256 GB+ SSD next year for a similar price? 32GB just isn't a whole lot of space even if its fast.

I bought 3 early gen 64 GB SSDs and put them in RAID. They're fast, but IMO weren't really worth what I paid for them. Right now I use them for applications and I have Windows on a regular 640 GB drive. SSD's give you faster OS boot times, but IMO the OS is plenty snappy once it's booted and in RAM. I'd rather have very fast application load times.


Also, XP? Really? I mean, Vista was faster than XP post SP1, and the security was dramatically better. There's no reason not to upgrade to 7.
 
Win7, Im just used to WinXp, and I use alot of older apps/games, is it all compatible?
And which Win7, is there a Pro, or is it just Home?
 
*Ç|®8tË<ETH>;1035732472 said:
Win7, Im just used to WinXp, and I use alot of older apps/games, is it all compatible?
And which Win7, is there a Pro, or is it just Home?
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You'll want the "Home Premium" edition unless you need support for domains or want a license of XP for running in a virtual machine. You can always use the anytime upgrade feature to go from Home Premium to Pro if you want to.

Software compatibility is generally great. I have a huge game collection and haven't run into anything I couldn't run. Older hardware can be an issue, but still generally not a problem. If you have an old printer or scanner you'll want to make sure Windows 7 drivers are available.
 
Putting just the OS on the SSD seems retarded to me. Assuming you have enough ram, outside of initial boot times it's going to do almost nothing for you. The real benefit is launching apps that aren't already in memory.
 
Oldie said:
Putting just the OS on the SSD seems retarded to me. Assuming you have enough ram, outside of initial boot times it's going to do almost nothing for you. The real benefit is launching apps that aren't already in memory.
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I fell the same way. For people who keep their PC on most of the time anyways, your space is better spent on frequently used applications.
 
Buy RAM and with Windows 7 never close a friggin application....
 
Win7, OS + Apps on SSD = New computing experience.

Get the X-25m and ear to ear grins!
 
I agree. I knew the SSD and Win7 would be quick, but it is soooo much better.

SSD + Win7 = TEH WINNAR!
 
Oldie said:
Putting just the OS on the SSD seems retarded to me. Assuming you have enough ram, outside of initial boot times it's going to do almost nothing for you. The real benefit is launching apps that aren't already in memory.
Click to expand...

I tried to hold on to this same reasoning for not upgrading to an SSD for an OS drive.
I had 3x500gb RAID 0 for OS and 8gb of RAM, then I upgraded the OS drive to a 60gb SSD and was expecting no major gain.
Oh how wrong was I on my assumptions, I will never go back to HDD for an OS drive.

Two months later, I decided to go back to my RAID 0 setup just to see if it was just a fluke.
No comparison, went back to SSD within a day.
 
BillNutz said:
Two months later, I decided to go back to my RAID 0 setup just to see if it was just a fluke.
No comparison, went back to SSD within a day.
Click to expand...

You get faster boot/shutdown times. Other than that the OS is in RAM anyway.
 
BillNutz said:
I tried to hold on to this same reasoning for not upgrading to an SSD for an OS drive.
I had 3x500gb RAID 0 for OS and 8gb of RAM, then I upgraded the OS drive to a 60gb SSD and was expecting no major gain.
Oh how wrong was I on my assumptions, I will never go back to HDD for an OS drive.

Two months later, I decided to go back to my RAID 0 setup just to see if it was just a fluke.
No comparison, went back to SSD within a day.
Click to expand...

I think you misunderstood his post. Oldie wasn't saying that putting the OS on an SSD seems like a bad idea; he was responding to what the OP heard the guy at Fry's telling a customer (put JUST the OS on the SSD and put EVERYTHING else on rotating media).

In other words, yeah, it would be pretty stupid to put just the OS on the SSD and leave the rest of the space free when you could be installing your frequently-used apps on it. Put your OS + apps on the SSD, and use mechanical drives for vids, music, etc. that are pointless to keep on solid state storage.
 
BillNutz said:
I tried to hold on to this same reasoning for not upgrading to an SSD for an OS drive.
I had 3x500gb RAID 0 for OS and 8gb of RAM, then I upgraded the OS drive to a 60gb SSD and was expecting no major gain.
Oh how wrong was I on my assumptions, I will never go back to HDD for an OS drive.

Two months later, I decided to go back to my RAID 0 setup just to see if it was just a fluke.
No comparison, went back to SSD within a day.
Click to expand...

Heheh, hard drives in raid 0 has never been a good idea for your O.S. Raid 0 may increase your threw-put bandwidth, but but hurts your access time which is the most important thing for your O.S. responsiveness. Now SSDs in raid 0 is a different story because they scale much better in raid 0 than hard drives.
 
Anyone tried any of the new SATA3 ssd's? I'm considering the Crucial C300 for os and app drive.
 
Skyblue said:
Anyone tried any of the new SATA3 ssd's? I'm considering the Crucial C300 for os and app drive.
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Looks like an awesome drive in terms of speed, but it's kind of unproven at this point. I'm interested in it but I'm just fine with my Intels right now in terms of speed, and I know they are reliable. My plan is to wait for the C300 to come down in price; meanwhile I'll be enjoying my rig and studying long term reports of the Crucial drives. If it stands the test of time then I can purchase one later for less $, it's a win-win scenario for me. :)

However for someone that doesn't own an SSD at this point, I must admit the Crucial would be tempting (as well as the OCZ SandForce drives). I just chose Intel because I always value reliability over performance. They offer excellent reliability and random IOPS/r/w performance while lacking only in terms of sequential write speeds, which matters very little in my experience.
 
imyourzero said:
Looks like an awesome drive in terms of speed, but it's kind of unproven at this point. I'm interested in it but I'm just fine with my Intels right now in terms of speed, and I know they are reliable. My plan is to wait for the C300 to come down in price; meanwhile I'll be enjoying my rig and studying long term reports of the Crucial drives. If it stands the test of time then I can purchase one later for less $, it's a win-win scenario for me. :)

However for someone that doesn't own an SSD at this point, I must admit the Crucial would be tempting (as well as the OCZ SandForce drives). I just chose Intel because I always value reliability over performance. They offer excellent reliability and random IOPS/r/w performance while lacking only in terms of sequential write speeds, which matters very little in my experience.
Click to expand...

Certainly the intel drives are next in line for consideration. However, 160gb is just a tad too little perhaps? My current system drive would be full if I had only 160gb.. .. Which is why the c300 looked promising. 256gb will be more than enough until next time I upgrade :)
 
Skyblue said:
Certainly the intel drives are next in line for consideration. However, 160gb is just a tad too little perhaps? My current system drive would be full if I had only 160gb.. .. Which is why the c300 looked promising. 256gb will be more than enough until next time I upgrade :)
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You don't need everything on the SSD. Just the OS and anything you frequently play. Put everything else on HDD. Re-route user folders to D:\ and you're set.

I've got the OS, Office, Firefox, and all of my other apps on C:. D:\ has all of my games, except Dragon Age and its expansion which I keep on the SSD, and I have 14GB free of 60GB. You don't need every game and app on the SSD. Just the frequently used ones, the not-too-big ones, and for games, the ones with frequent loading screens.

I mean, just an example. Team Fortress 2 is on my HDD. What does being on the SSD gain you? A few seconds of loading time every 20 minutes when the map changes? And you still have to wait for everyone else anyway (same applies here for me for Guild Wars). A lot of folks are like "My Steam folder is like 8 million GB so I can't do an SSD". Seriously, put it on D:\, it'll be fine there.
 
I want to wait till the 3rd Gen Intel drives projected towards the end of the year but I will tell you that its pretty damn hard.
 
ZodaEX said:
Heheh, hard drives in raid 0 has never been a good idea for your O.S. Raid 0 may increase your threw-put bandwidth, but but hurts your access time which is the most important thing for your O.S. responsiveness. Now SSDs in raid 0 is a different story because they scale much better in raid 0 than hard drives.
Click to expand...
Nonsense. I've had 5 pairs of drives in RAID0 over the years and access time may have slowed .1 ms on some of the lesser on-board RAID chips compared to the single drive at worst. And since access times are unchanged, and STR has basically doubles as well with HDD's, how do SSD's scale better?
 
In my laptop, I use Windows 7 and a 160 Gig Intel. In the desktop, I have an 80 Gig Intel for Windows 7 and 2 1.5 Terabyte drives for storage.

I have an audio workstation at work that needs quick access to an sql database. I use Windows XP on it (due to software compatibility). I bought the 40 Gig Intel value drive and it works wonderfully for that under XP.
 
Access time is irrelevant; IOps is all that counts, ultimately. Too bad the difference between access time and IOps is so unclear; perhaps should write an I/O performance guide sometime.
 
ToddW2 said:
Win7, OS + Apps on SSD = New computing experience.
Click to expand...

AMEN!

I would look at a Kingston V series to keep the cost down. You can get by with a 64 Gig if you are really picky about your apps but personally I perfer the 128 Gig to give myself a little space.
 
Some of those Kingstons actually have JMicron-controller, so i would be very careful which you get. Some Kingston 40/80GB are actually Intel-controlled SSDs. Most of them are Indilinx Barefoot and some are a new resurrection of the worst SSD-controller of all time; JMicron JMF-602. :p

Though JMicron fixes the 'stuttering' problem due to extremely high write latencies, they still can't produce a controller that works properly. Not that strange, since they couldn't even launch RAID0-drivers that worked properly on their existing SATA controller HBAs.
 
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