Multiple hard drive setup advice please

[Hullboy]

Hi there,

Im just building my computer as we speak and am just about reading to install my OS (windows 7 ultimate). Now, i have 3 hard drives, a 40GB Corsair Force SSD, 150GB Velociraptor HLFS, and a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3.

I was going to use the:

SSD for OS
Velociraptor for Apps
Samsung for Storage

Heres a few questions i have:

1.) Will i still see significant improvements in speeds using the SSD for an OS even though i am going have to load my applications from another hard drive?

2.) Which of my 2 hardrives do you think would be best for my applications. The velociraptor with 10k rpm but only 16mb cache, or the 7.2k rpm samsung with a 32mb cache?

3.) Im sure this has been covered before, but are their any specific things you have to do in order to install windows 7 on an SSD. Does anyone know any useful guides?

Thanks
Chris

 

[lrlcr]

Set your bios sata controller to achi. Install windows.

 

[Viscount]

That's thrown me a bit since i'm in a similar boat having never used an SSD in a build before. I had to look that up and came across this:

http://forum-en.msi.com/faq/article/ide-sata-and-ahci-all-you-need-to-know

AHCI and SSDs
Typically, many hardware review sites, as well as SSD manufacturers are recommending that AHCI mode is used with SSD drives. However, we have run our own tests here in the forum, and we believe this is misleading, only where SSD drives are used independently (ie not in a RAID array).

AHCI mode as previously explained enables NCQ (native command queuing) which is really not required for SSDs as they do not need optimising in this way as there is no physical movement of heads or platters. In many cases, it can actually hinder SSD performance, and even reduce the lifetime of your SSD.

Is this statement wrong ?

 

[bledd]

The advice always given is to use AHCI, I stick by this.

When installing Windows, only have your SSD plugged in, it will save any potential heart-ache of the boot files being written to another drive

 

[neil_g]

i found my SSD (OCZ Vertex) was slower not running in AHCI personally

 

[skyripper]

1.) Will i still see significant improvements in speeds using the SSD for an OS even though i am going have to load my applications from another hard drive?

Your boot times should significantly improve, and overall responsiveness should be much better.

2.) Which of my 2 hardrives do you think would be best for my applications. The velociraptor with 10k rpm but only 16mb cache, or the 7.2k rpm samsung with a 32mb cache?

The Samsung is probably quicker than the Raptor despite the rpm difference - number of platters, sector density etc. Run HDTune on them both, and base your decision on the graph results.

3.) Im sure this has been covered before, but are their any specific things you have to do in order to install windows 7 on an SSD. Does anyone know any useful guides?

With a 40GB SSD, you will need to stay on top of space management. Most of these things will only take minutes.

Shift your Pagefile off the SSD to a regular hard drive. Run the Windows Experience Index benchmarks once all your drivers and updates have been done, as Windows 7 will detect an SSD and make decisions on SuperFetch, Prefetch etc.

Turn off indexing on the C: drive, and you can also shift where Windows stores its indexes if you are that way inclined.

Download WinDirStat and use that to identify space hogs on your SSD. Temp directories, Downloads folder, Steam/Impulse/Origin programs etc. can all be shifted to your regular hard drive.

...Stuff from MSI forum...

Is this statement wrong ?

I dont see how using AHCI over IDE will lead to more writes on your SSD which is what affects the lifetime of your SSD. It will let you use the Intel (assuming thats your chipset vendor) drivers which are measurably faster than IDE mode.

Besides, even though NCQ isnt much use for an SSD, any other regular hard drives in your system will thank you for it.