General SSD Questions

[digilink]

I've got Windows 7 Ultimate x64 running on two Intel 40gb SSD's in a RAID 0 config and so far the speed is phenomenal... better than any drive I have ever experienced!

I also have a 1 terabyte SATA drive that I've installed my games, photos, music, etc to, but I'm worried about the stress Windows may be causing on the SSD's with this config. Is there a guide or best practice I should follow to tweak my installation? I'd hate to have to replace these drives before it's too late...

 

[sub.mesa]

You should be fine. A clean install of Windows 7 on SSDs would disable stuff like defrag and SuperFetch, which increase write rate without any positive returns so useless on SSDs.

Just put active stuff (applications, OS, firefox profile, some games you play the most) on your SSD, and write all large files like downloads, torrents, archives, movies, music and other files that are "written once sequentially and read sequentially or streaming reads" should go on your HDD instead. This would make the perfect combination; your HDD for storage capacity of files that are not performance sensitive (playing a movie just needs a certain speed and higher won't make it play better). While files that *are* performance sensitive would be stored on your SSD instead.

 

[Haiku214]

Putting games on your second hard drive defeats the purpose of SSD on your games.

 

[digilink]

You should be fine. A clean install of Windows 7 on SSDs would disable stuff like defrag and SuperFetch, which increase write rate without any positive returns so useless on SSDs.

Just put active stuff (applications, OS, firefox profile, some games you play the most) on your SSD, and write all large files like downloads, torrents, archives, movies, music and other files that are "written once sequentially and read sequentially or streaming reads" should go on your HDD instead. This would make the perfect combination; your HDD for storage capacity of files that are not performance sensitive (playing a movie just needs a certain speed and higher won't make it play better). While files that *are* performance sensitive would be stored on your SSD instead.

Thanks.. I actually just looked at defrag and it's set to manual. What about system logs? Should I move them? (if they can be moved?) There are quite a few of them at the moment.... I think around 32k or so.

Putting games on your second hard drive defeats the purpose of SSD on your games.

I only play WoW and FPS' such as the Battlefield series... would I see any real world performance increases? My main goal with these SSD's was to experiment with them as well as have Windows and the associated apps I use on a daily basis boot and execute as quickly as possible...

 

[sub.mesa]

Putting games on your second hard drive defeats the purpose of SSD on your games.

Not really, since with the SSD handling all system I/O (DirectX and tons of libraries that get accessed) the HDD can dedicate itself to serve I/O for the game data only, which means less seeks and higher performance.

It depends on the game whether putting on an SSD will have any effect. But generally, offline games will not benefit from SSD and online MMORPG can have a decent benefit from SSDs, due to them not able to pre-cache everything due to the dynamic nature of online play.

World of Warcraft is actually a very good example on this. If you stick to the single player content all is fine, but on massive PVP you can get stutters in your FPS (spiking downward to 4.0fps for a brief moment) if lot's of new game content suddenly enters your playfield, causing sync reads to be performed. So putting your WoW directory on SSD can be good if you're a serious WoW player, but the start content works just fine on HDD. Other MMORPGs are quite alike in this respect.