Hard drive upgrade ideas, requesting feedback

[biggles]

Considering the following upgrades and changes:
*Put Seagate 500 gb momentus xt drive into desktop PC as data drive for computer games (ssd currently used for os).
*Purchase new ssd and put it into MSI gt780dx laptop as system drive (the laptop currently uses the Seagate momentus xt for the os). Either a 240 gb or a 480 gb size ssd.

Questions:
1. Would games on the desktop pc load much faster from a hybrid drive vs a mechanical drive?
2. Would the MSI laptop perform much better in real world usage with an ssd rather than the hybrid drive? The reviews I found indicated that hybrid drive performance is right in the middle of mechanical drive and ssd performance.
3. I bought the MSI laptop from xoticpc and it didn't come with a DVD for Windows 7. How do I go about installing Windows 7 on the ssd that gets installed into the laptop?

 

[drescherjm]

Would games on the desktop pc load much faster from a hybrid drive vs a mechanical drive?

As an owner of 4 Momentus XT drives I say most of the time the 500GB Momentus XT hybrid will be slower than a 3.5inch 7200 RPM hard drive.

 

[NoOther]

Questions:
1. Would games on the desktop pc load much faster from a hybrid drive vs a mechanical drive?

Yes, they will most certainly load faster and you should also get faster load times for maps and scenes. But the games will not necessarily play faster. The game or play speed will be pretty much identical.

2. Would the MSI laptop perform much better in real world usage with an ssd rather than the hybrid drive? The reviews I found indicated that hybrid drive performance is right in the middle of mechanical drive and ssd performance.

Depends on what you consider real world usage. Loading programs and sometimes even switching between programs where there is some type of loading from cache (or waking from sleep,etc) will be faster. Usually a Hybrid drive for laptops is a good compromise between cost and performance. One thing that having a full SSD in the laptop may improve is if you travel and carry it around a lot, the SSD is not affected by the jostling. But personally I have yet to link any laptop HDD failures to that.

3. I bought the MSI laptop from xoticpc and it didn't come with a DVD for Windows 7. How do I go about installing Windows 7 on the ssd that gets installed into the laptop?

Here is the official Microsoft support link for that.

 

[dragonstongue]

well considering the cost and the average performance gain if I were to go with any sort of hybrid type it would be the Caviar Black version, beyond this, in many cases the OS drive is already on an SSD where everything else will not always get the benefit of being on an SSD in the first place, many of my games/apps I have tried on 3 of my drives
60gb Agility 3
640gb caviar black partition and short-stroked
1tb caviar blue

gaming wise, I honestly notice very little difference in load times, OS wise, swapping between tasks and stuff like that which is OS bound hell yeh its faster, everything else it seems an expensive proposition when a standard "good" drive in many cases will keep up.

to answer the first question, depends yes some games do, some games do not, and some games will actually load slower, if I could find it there was a list of something like 200 games tested on various pc systems and consoles to break down to the basics of is an SSD or hybrid worth it, the vast majority of time yes in nearly all aspects on the SSD, for the hybrid on console yes worth it vs mechanical, where for pc interesting enough a decent mechanical vs hybrid it was something like a 60:40 mechanical wins over hybrid in many cases apparently the burst type speed the hybrid offers might be massive however when it cannot burst its info its sustained speed suffers vs the average mechanical out there currently.

I would say desktop wise, don't waste the coin not worth it in many cases as you already have the ssd there, get a decent mechanical say like the new caviar blue 1-2 tb, or a caviar black 1-4tb f you really want speed, for the laptop well hell yeh, the faster she goes the less battery you burn up, and if you get a large enough one say a 480gb it should be ample for everything on said laptop without even needing another drive so you save power, and have uber speed

 

[biggles]

Hmmm, I had trouble figuring out that link posted by noOther above. How about this: if I have a dvd for windows 7 pro version (desktop pc), can I use this dvd to install windows 7 home premium on the laptop once the ssd is installed? Obviously I would enter the serial number corresponding to the laptop windows 7 at the appropriate time.

And one more question: do I need to change any bios settings to get the computer to boot with the ssd? I seem to recall having to change something when I switched from mechanical drive to ssd on the desktop several years ago.

 

[dragonstongue]

you should set it to AHCI for best performance, and no, the sticker for pro works for one install on one system if its in use as far as I know it will black mark the copy so whichever system uses it will be the one that is "genuine" and because it is a completely different system and you want to install a completely different version your asking for issues, if the current version is not and has never been installed then you should be good to go, there are ways around this but I will not instruct you how to do this.

There is a specific key for each version of install, Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate these keys do not work for each other. There is a specific place on the disk that holds a certain keyword that if it is changed to these versions or is removed completely by burning into ISO you can install whatever version you want, this also allows slipstreaming certain drivers into the install and so forth, however, you still need a valid key for the corresponding version, you can reinstall it x times before it needs to be re-validated with Microsoft.

Anyways going to take some reading on your end to see what you can and cannot do, the biggest thing is just that, need valid key for the version you intend on using, I believe MSFT sells them directly at a slightly reduced cost, well at least they used to before windows fake errr 8 came out.