Time to get an SSD.

Pimp Ninja

Ive got about €150 to spend and am considering an SSD.

Current system as follows:
Dell XPS 720
Core 2 quad 2.4 Q6600 1066mhz (as reported by BIOS)
8gm Ram - 800mhz DDR2 (as reported by BIOS)
Aegia PhysX PCI card
ATI HD5850 (Sapphire - 1gig)
Dell H750P-00 - 750 watt PSU
Random 500gig SATA drive

The main purpose of the SSD will be for the Operating system, and some games.

Ive been looking at the 60gig OCZ Vertex2.
Komplett have it for €120
Memory C have it for €124 (free delivery in ireland).

Im quite happy to order from Memory C - have ordered a good few bits from them in the past and never had any issues.
- Plus Delivery times are FANTASTIC !

I had also thought of installing the web browsers & mail clients onto this drive (but putting their storage folders on the secondary disk) just because it pisses me off that I have to wait for them to load :P - anyway I dont want to go into config specifics yet (as in OS/Application setup - will do that later, or on another thread).

I just wanted to know, whats the general opinion on this drive, should I be looking at something else or is this my new puppy?


Thanks in advance
- Pimpeh

Monotype

The drive is one of the most highly recommended SSDs. It would be one of the best choices for your system.
Is 60GB enough? Windows 7 can be about 30GB with a few bits installed. You'd want to leave a bit of spare room. How big are these games?

Pimp Ninja

Ill have to check the install sizes - but the current intention is
OS - Win 7 Ultimate 64bit (yes licenced and legit),
Browser,

Games of the moment are
Starcraft2
R.U.S.E.

I might be able to stretch the budget to €170 for the 80gig

Pimp Ninja

Microsoft website seems to think that 20gig is the recommended disk space requirement for 64bit Win 7.

Starcraft 2 recommended is 12 gig

R.U.S.E. 9 gig

Office 2007 2gig

Thats 43 gig without trying - :eek::eek:
I think I may have to go for the 80 gig....

marco_polo

Monotype wrote: »

The drive is one of the most highly recommended SSDs. It would be one of the best choices for your system.
Is 60GB enough? Windows 7 can be about 30GB with a few bits installed. You'd want to leave a bit of spare room. How big are these games?

I'd say 60Gb is loads for the OS a good few programs and having a couple of games on rotation. I have 19 GB spare on a 40Gb SSD with which has quite a few programs installed to it as well (Although anything I hardly ever use is farmed off to the HDD). As far as i can remember just the clean install of Window 7 64 bit Home Premium on its own was in the region of 14-15Gb or thereabouts.

You would want to leave a decent few GBs free for the drive wear leveling algorithms to work with though.

Also OP when you are finished with a game and want to move it back to the mechanical drive, junction points will be your new best friend .

VenomIreland

Might save up for one of these myself, although most of my games probably wouldn't be stored on the SSD (around 90GB of games on STEAM alone), anyway, I don't mean to thread-jack, but is there any guide for moving from a single HDD install to an SSD + HDD install?

marco_polo

VenomIreland wrote: »

Might save up for one of these myself, although most of my games probably wouldn't be stored on the SSD (around 90GB of games on STEAM alone), anyway, I don't mean to thread-jack, but is there any guide for moving from a single HDD install to an SSD + HDD install?

You have to do it manually at the moment, if the game has its own folder in steamapps on the HHD you simply move the entire game folder to the SSD, delete the game folder in steamapps, create a junction point (NTFS directory symbolic link) with the same name as the original folder in the directory you have just deleted the folder from.

If you search steamforums for SDD + junction point you will find a few guides on how to create the junction (requires one of a number of free third party tool to do easily, as MS saw fit not to provide this functionality for free).

EDIT: Here is one from MSDN

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768

VenomIreland

marco_polo wrote: »

You have to do it manually at the moment, if the game has its own folder in steamapps on the HHD you simply move the entire game folder to the SSD delete the game folder in steamapps, create a junction point (symbolic link) with the same name as the original folder.

If you search steamforums for SDD + junction point you will find a few guides.

Hmm, handy, I could do that for all of my games, although since I want to put my OS on the SSD, I might just do a clean install on the SSD, then attach the HDD and "re-configure" Steam i.e. delete everything but SteamApps and steam.exe.

Monotype

There's a program that does the shortcuts for you.
http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover

I think steam should really have had that functionality itself.

VenomIreland

Monotype wrote: »

There's a program that does the shortcuts for you.
http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover

I think steam should really have had that functionality itself.

I'd probably be doing a clean install anyway, would much prefer to, let's me see how much crap I have installed that is completely unnecessary, might only even need a 60GB drive, with most games installed on the HDD.

Arciphel

Does your motherboard support sata 3 - 6Gbps or Sara 2 - 3Gbps? Just to understand where the system bottleneck would be. If sata 2 then Intel x25 is good enough. If sata 3 then save for crucial c300 with the latest chooser controllers.

marco_polo

Monotype wrote: »

There's a program that does the shortcuts for you.
http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover

I think steam should really have had that functionality itself.

How have I not heard of this before, this is way better. :cool:

VenomIreland

Arciphel wrote: »

Does your motherboard support sata 3 - 6Gbps or Sara 2 - 3Gbps? Just to understand where the system bottleneck would be. If sata 2 then Intel x25 is good enough. If sata 3 then save for crucial c300 with the latest chooser controllers.

If his motherboard is DDR2 and C2D then I think he'd only have SATA-2.

VenomIreland

marco_polo wrote: »

How have I not heard of this before, this is way better.

Ah yeah, but you lose geek points for using it and not doing it manually

Pimp Ninja

The board is quite old ~3/4 years so Id guess (have looked - cant find) that its only SATA 2.

Again, I cant confirm it so Im not sure... still digging tho.

marco_polo

VenomIreland wrote: »

Ah yeah, but you lose geek points for using it and not doing it manually

Ah I was already a big girls blouse anyway because I wasn't creating the links directly the registry. :pac:

VenomIreland

marco_polo wrote: »

Ah I was already a big girls blouse anyway because I wasn't creating the links directly the registry. :pac:

Symlinks are geekier, because the average person will at least have heard of a registry

Ghost Estate

multi-level cell (MLC) flash

i'd steer clear of this for anything that is frequently re-written. don't install a swap file/partition on it anyway.

Saadyst

Ghost Estate wrote: »

i'd steer clear of this for anything that is frequently re-written. don't install a swap file/partition on it anyway.

MLC is consumer-grade technology now. The main alternative is SLC (Single..) which is primarily used at the server / datacenter level. SLC will be MUCH more expensive as you would expect.

Intel state that on their second gen SSDs you should be able to write around 20GB a day for up to five years - that's quite suitable for the vast majority of consumer usage. As SSDs get bigger, longevity increases (as there are more cells...) substantially, even if individual write limits per cell decrease.

So.. I wouldn't worry about SLC vs MLC for 95% of consumer use

Moon54

Yeah, Pimp Ninja , I'd recommend them. I got mine in MemoryC.com too, great Irish company.

That's pretty much the same situation as me. There is a lot of talk on the net about optimising & organising the SSD, but I found the best way is to Keep It Simple!

So basically, I installed windows, then ran the WEI to make sure Windows detects the SSD drive as configured correctly (primary hard disk should be 7.7) and then used the location feature of my Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Music & Pictures folders to move them to the second drive. I kept my steam folder on the secondary drive cause it's pretty big.

I found that to be the best way to do it, imho. The SSD is half full, with all my Apps installed, and is very zippy to use. Also, an added benefit of putting the folders on the secondary drive is that it doesn't spin-down as much as it used to, because it's been accessed more often.

Hope that helps.

grizzly

Moon54 wrote: »

Yeah, Pimp Ninja , I'd recommend them. I got mine in MemoryC.com too, great Irish company.

That's pretty much the same situation as me. There is a lot of talk on the net about optimising & organising the SSD, but I found the best way is to Keep It Simple!

So basically, I installed windows, then ran the WEI to make sure Windows detects the SSD drive as configured correctly (primary hard disk should be 7.7) and then used the location feature of my Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Music & Pictures folders to move them to the second drive. I kept my steam folder on the secondary drive cause it's pretty big.

I found that to be the best way to do it, imho. The SSD is half full, with all my Apps installed, and is very zippy to use. Also, an added benefit of putting the folders on the secondary drive is that it doesn't spin-down as much as it used to, because it's been accessed more often.

Hope that helps.

So if your're playing games off the non-SSD secondary drive are you not losing the benefit? That is after booting the OS off the main SSD drive you're then constantly using the older drive?

Hank Scorpio

For games is it as simple as dragging and dropping the game folder from drive to drive?

Moon54

grizzly wrote: »

So if your're playing games off the non-SSD secondary drive are you not losing the benefit? That is after booting the OS off the main SSD drive you're then constantly using the older drive?

If it's solely a gaming machine that would probably be true, yeah.
With most new games using 5-15 GB of space, I suppose it's possible to install one or two onto the SSD.
That steam mover program mentioned above should do the trick, though I've not tried it.

Saadyst

grizzly wrote: »

So if your're playing games off the non-SSD secondary drive are you not losing the benefit? That is after booting the OS off the main SSD drive you're then constantly using the older drive?

Most games won't benefit much, or at all, from playing off an SSD, aside from load times. There are exceptions I imagine, but for the vast majority a regular HDD is fine.

Pimp Ninja

Well, it landed yesterday.
I spent the evening installing the OS (win 7 64 bit) and drivers. Boot, login and shut down times are hugely increased.

Couldnt find any AHCI options in the bios??
Its a latest version A06 - flashed it about a month ago.

First thing I did was turn off the pagefile. Would it be a good idea to turn it back on and run it from the 500gig Hard Drive ?

Also, from what I understood Windows 7 should have disabled Superfetch and the Defrag scheduler automagically, but it didnt. So I disabled these manually.
I then went and turned off search indexing service and drive indexing.

Gotta go searching the webs and see if there are any other configs I need to update.

Griffin87

have a look at these guides

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?63273-*-Windows-7-Ultimate-Tweaks-amp-Utilities-*

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?79848-THE-BASIC-GUIDE-amp-FAQ-ABC-for-OCZ-SSD


my ocz vertex 2 180gb arrived today cant wait to set it up

Dublin_Gunner

60 or 80GiB will leave you wishing you had a second or bigger SSD.

By the time you've installed OS, drivers, essential software etc onto it, that 80GiB will be looking pretty full.

However, I would say you'd get away with the 80GiB for OS etc

Don't install any games in it though, you'll run out of space in no time.

Unregistered.

Pimp Ninja wrote: »

First thing I did was turn off the pagefile. Would it be a good idea to turn it back on and run it from the 500gig Hard Drive ?

Yes.

Monotype

I would leave it on the SSD for the reasons below.

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that
Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

However, with 8GB of RAM, you'd hope that its use would be kept to a minimum and the storage space might be of more value.

marco_polo

Pimp Ninja wrote: »

Well, it landed yesterday.
I spent the evening installing the OS (win 7 64 bit) and drivers. Boot, login and shut down times are hugely increased.

Couldnt find any AHCI options in the bios??
Its a latest version A06 - flashed it about a month ago.

First thing I did was turn off the pagefile. Would it be a good idea to turn it back on and run it from the 500gig Hard Drive ?

Also, from what I understood Windows 7 should have disabled Superfetch and the Defrag scheduler automagically, but it didnt. So I disabled these manually.
I then went and turned off search indexing service and drive indexing.

Gotta go searching the webs and see if there are any other configs I need to update.

Should had disabled defrag etc, although it may be that this only happens on a fresh install in ACHI mode*.

*Just taking a guess here can't find any confirmation on way or the other

This blog on MSDN is well worth a read as well.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Unregistered.

Monotype wrote: »

I would leave it on the SSD for the reasons below.



http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

However, with 8GB of RAM, you'd hope that its use would be kept to a minimum and the storage space might be of more value.

I absolutely agree with this - random reads from an SSD will be significantly faster than from HDD. However, if OP does not want it on their SSD, then it should be moved to a hard disk and not disabled all together.