The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
SSD boot disk help
zfleeman
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey all,
I'm going to be building my first Windows machine this October (in preparation for Skyrim), and I want to do what I believe is a common practice.
I want to run all of the OS/boot information on an SSD and use an HDD for my chunkier stuff like games. I know that a lot of people do/have done this, so I was wondering if you had any tutorials that are handy that you could send my way. Some misguided Googling has only revealed old forum posts of scared people in 2009, when Windows 7 came out.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I'm going to be building my first Windows machine this October (in preparation for Skyrim), and I want to do what I believe is a common practice.
I want to run all of the OS/boot information on an SSD and use an HDD for my chunkier stuff like games. I know that a lot of people do/have done this, so I was wondering if you had any tutorials that are handy that you could send my way. Some misguided Googling has only revealed old forum posts of scared people in 2009, when Windows 7 came out.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
zfleeman on
0
Posts
SSD failure rates are very high - be prepared to backup your system religiously.
To get the best performance from the new SSDs, you will need a 6 Gbps SATA controller.
assuming you're building this into a desktop, bear in mind that a lot of ssds are 2.5" laptop drives, so you may either need to buy a separate 3.5" enclosure or at least make sure you're getting the right size, because they're certainly less common.
as angelhedgie suggests, you shouldn't need a tutorial - just plug her in and when you do the os install don't pick the wrong drive.
sure, but you don't need one to get merely wonderfully improved performance
windows 7 has a great deal of inbuilt optimizations in this regard. if you're paranoid about the thing expiring, there's a lot you can do - but my personal research indicates that the drive itself isn't going to cark it within the expected lifespan of my computer anyway, so it's not a big worry
That said, what the above said re: it simply being another disk drive. Just primary it for all your boot/os goodies and use the good ol fashioned sata you get for your game data.
I dunno though... if it were up to me, I'd probably not use the SSD for booting Windows, but instead put my OS on a normal disk and my games on the SSD. You can get MASSIVE time savings when you're loading a game if you have a speedier hard drive (MMOs in particular) that I think are much more significant than spending 15 seconds instead of 30 when you start your computer. (Disclaimer: Yes, the savings may be much more significant than that, I really don't know-- but my point is that Windows 7 already boots pretty fast, even on the laptop I'm about to describe.) As is, my current laptop has such a slow hard drive that when I go to play an MMO and log on to my characters or zone in to a dungeon/raid/etc., it takes me a VERY long time to get in (probably only 30 seconds, depending on what I'm loading, but people are impatient so it feels much worse). Same thing with other modern games if I'm trying to play with my fiance over LAN-- he loads the next map very quickly, then has to wait for my loading to catch up so we're synced. And this is without him even having an SSD, which is going to be a TON faster, so it would probably load instantaneously for him. If SSDs are unreliable at the moment, then sure, make sure your saves are stored elsewhere. But I'd personally definitely take advantage of the faster loading times on anything that doesn't have to save data to the same hard drive (and certainly with something like an MMO, the most you could possibly lose is addon settings). And I much prefer the idea that everything will load speedily when I start it to savings on just ONE load per day or per several hours (Windows).
EDIT: Also, don't listen to the gibbering idiots out on some of the hardware forums on the internet, who think if you breathe on your SSD the wrong way you'll cut it's working lifespan in half. The lengths some of these people go to in order to try and remove their SSD from all but the barest of functions makes me wonder why they bought the thing in the first place.
And for what it's worth, my experience with my Intel SSD has been flawless. Win7 boots up quickly, and hums along quietly in the background, doing all those background-y things without a problem.
Ditto that there's nothing special that needs to be done. The only advice I was given is to turn off hibernation as that created a page file that is the same size as your RAM, wasting 4-16GBs on your drive.