ssd for OS question

alistair55

alistair55

alistair55

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2 Sep 2010
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350
I'm thinking of getting a ssd for my OS but the thing is I want to run the rest of my stuff games ect off my western digital black except mabe a demanding game that I'm doing benchmarks but I don't want to be messing around changing stuff when or if steam wants to install my games to the ssd instead of the black. also what size should I consider and how easy would it be to set up?
 
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You get better performance using the 3gbps slots than the SATA III slots mate, the Marvell drivers for the controller is pants...

I personally wouldn't use anything less than 80GB for my OS drive, I have the gen2 Kingston M series (the exact same drives as the Intel X25-M) 80GB version, and I only have a couple of demanding games and all my apps and OS installed on the SSD and I only have 17GB free space left, I'm seriously considering selling the 80GB SSD and getting a 160GB instead.
 
I have limited knowledge but from what I've read if you're using Win 7 then it will all be taken care of, just treat it as a normal HDD.
 
Just make sure you have ahci setup in the bios and not IDE mode as you will get better performance. I have the asus u3s6 card which gives me 2 sata3 ports and 2 usb3 ports. Which is perfect for future roofing your computer as I don't want to upgrade my Core 2 quad to the Core i7 as its too expensive. The card costs about £25 and my read speed have gone from 285mb/s max to 387mb/s with my C300 64gb. I use it as a OS drive so don't need fast writes perfer fast reads.

If you doing a new install juat set the bios of AHCI mode and then format the drive with windows 7 setup and that it. Let it install should take about 15mins with a fast SSD. Then when you start up it uses MS AHCi driver. If you want to use the latest Marvel drivers then install them. I use the marvell drivers for about 3 weeks then switch back to the MS driver so that TRIM is passed to SSD drive. As marvell do not support TRIM in the drivers even though the hardware supports it. Then I switch back to the Marvel drivers after a week on the MS drivers. This way my SSD performace very very fast.

If you need more help then Message me here.
 
Best thing to do it install all the programs you need on the SSD like office, Photoshop and any games you use a lot. Then save all you data files on your hard drive(s) and when installing program you may not need install them onto your hard drive (do this when installing goto custom install and define where you want your files to be stored)

I then image my SSD use Acronis to my HDD. When I feel my system is messing up with all the installing I have done of other progrem then I just reimage my SSD.

That way I get the most porformance and if my SSD dies or has a virus I can format and reimage it easily.

Also not if you use Chrome I found it writes a lot of tempory files to my SSD went surfing the we so I found this option workes well:

Goto to your Chrome icon on your desktop or you start menu. Right click it and then change to target from for example:

C:\Users\manish\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe

to

C:\Users\manish\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --user-data-dir=G:\temp

This way all the temporary files are stored on the G: hard drive temp directory (change this to say D: if that is you hard drive). Dont forget to create this directory in your hard drive.
 
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