SSD spec; sanity check...

[chaosophy]

Yep, another SSD thread. soz.

Finally got some free time off of work for a few days, have some money to burn from all the o/t I've been doing so it's upgrade time.

I was going to wait until the final release of Win7 before going SSD but now thinking I might just try the RC as it should see me good until early next year, along with dual booting Vista or more likely XP. (all x64).

At the moment I currently have two main HDD's...

x1 80GB boot, split into 20GB XP, 30GB Vista, remaining GB for a.n.other.
x1 250GB apps/games.

My thinking at the moment is to just replicate this with SSDs...

x1 Intel X25-M Mainstream 80GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive (SSDSA2MH080G2C1)
x1 Crucial M225 256GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive (CT256M225)

... judging by what seems to be popular/new at the moment on OcUK. I would then split the 80GB as above to dual/triple boot.

Anyone think I am mad for doing it? Obvious issues? Better alternatives? Would I be better getting three or so cheaper drives and raiding for the same space/performance?

And also what about swapfiles? Use the SSDs or keep one of the old physical drives in and use that? Want to completely remove the physical drives tbh. Did think about getting a smaller SSD for the second one and then keeping the large physical one in to move games backwards and forwards between the two when I want to play them. That's part of why I need the larger 2nd drive as I tend to have a lot installed/on the go at once.

I can afford it but it still is a fair chunk of money and couldn't really justify this normally, let alone spending any more but I've worked my nutz off this year and need a pressy.

Thanks.

 

[Talrinys]

Would probably work better waiting a few months until the dust settles after W7, there are no doubts after there being some great drives out already but the market needs some time to adjust to the new Intel offerings along with getting up in gear after the financial crisis, gonna take some more time until the truly great drives are out, and a lot will be happening for the rest of this year. If you do decide to buy one i think you're better off buying an Intel drive for boot drive and the most important apps/games, then waiting with your purchase of a larger the drive, the higher capacity ones are still extremely expensive, and should drop rapidly with 34nm and Windows 7.

The swapfile should be just fine, if you do decide to buy both of them, first of all i'll be really jealous, you should be able to enjoy the benefits of having no physical drives at all, a swapfile will of course reduce the lifetime of the drive, most of them are rated for about 5 years of relatively heavy day to day use.

 

[clocka]

either wait for the 320GB Intel drive or just get the 80GB intel drive and a regular 500gb harddrive for the games that dont fit on the intel drive.

I dont see how you have 250gb of appz and games, thats a crazy amount, i dont know anyone who couldnt install all their appz and games on a single 256gb ssd. Surely you don't play some of the games that are installed as thats like 30 or so games.

 

[chaosophy]

aaah, the old wait 3 months for something better response. I won't be off work with money to burn in three months and I've already been looking at SSDs for twice as long as that already.

No idea where the space goes tbh but my current 250GB formats to about 233GB usable and currently only has 21.7GB free, so still over 200GB of it is used.

I guess I could cut it back but I always have a lot of games on the go. I still buy games like I have the free time of a teenager but I don't. So I tend to buy and install them and have them all installed and ready to fire up whenever I do get the time/urge to play them. Can't waste half an hour downloading/installing/patching/copying from another drive/whatever just to play a game when I want to play it.

Then there's demo's to try, TV downloads etc, until they get backed up to the NAS. Oh, and stuff installed for work when I VPN in.


So, I'm slightly mad with my idea but any major technical issues? Apart from them getting cheaper is there really that much more performance to be gained on SATAII? Surely whatever I get now is still going to blow my HDDs our of the water?