SSD to purchase?

[sockky]

It's my birthday and naturally, i'm going to buy myself a present

Never really thought about it, but i don't have an SSD for what ever reason. I dont know what to go for / what size. is there much point going for something above 120GB range? and is there much point in getting something with a high write speed as I mainly want it for quicker game load times and to speed up general use of my OS.

Also, i'm on P67 chipset which i believe doesn't have SSD caching (i don't really know what it even does if im honest, i have a rough guess but never looked into it.) and just curious to know if this will hinder my performance a lot.

 

[JamesM]

Any SSD will be an upgrade over a normal hard drive, sata 2 or 3. My currently M4 drive has pretty low write speeds compared to other drives but I certainly wouldn't consider it slow.

Size wise it depends what your going to have installed. I have a 128GB drive and I'm running out of space after having windows, bf3, adobe software, steam + games, office and other drivers and small bits of software installed. On the other hand my laptop has a 64GB drive and has windows, office, some adobe software and other basic stuff and I still have 26GB remaining.

SSD caching is a way of keeping your original hard drive but using a SSD for the most frequently used programs.. So for example, you'd still have your 1TB hard drive but chrome/firefox, favourite games or programs will be cached to your SSD and will load faster. It's a half way mark between normal hard drive performance and a full SSD solution.

 

[Narj]

256GB is the sweet spot it seems. If it wasn't for the fact that I was running so many VMs, I'd still have tonnes of space left even with several games installed.

 

[sockky]

Awesome, myself i just want to be able to install windows and a couple if half decent sized games, e.g. bf3 and skyrim. So i think a 120GB will suffice and i can live with out the SSD caching, as nice as it may be.

I'll have a good browse in a minute, see what i can find that's cheap and cheerful

 

[wazza300]

caching is only supported on z68/z77,youll need a special caching ssd with its own software if you wanted to go down that route,otherwise its simpler to install the os onto the ssd