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Sturgeon's House

Solid State Drives: All They're Cracked Up To Be?


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  • 3 weeks later...

If you use them for the right stuff they are the single greatest change you can make for everyday feel of using a computer. They're very nice. 256 should be a pretty good size, and frankly for people who don't have them the black november deals are nuts. Even something as relatively old as an intel 530 is going to be a big deal for less than $.50 a gig, and the Samsung stuff's been nice and cheap for the high performance hotrods they are. A decent SSD from none is more of a jump than a good one from a decent one.

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For a drive your size I'd recommend everything except games and other huge media, and if you've got some games you play a ton endlessly or some with interminable load times you could bring those over too. I'm currently running a 160 GB one with a 15 GB game, and most everything on my computer other than my music and steam libraries on it.

 

Generally the absolutely killer stuff where it'll make a huge difference is the sort of application where it makes a lot of little writes. Stuff like a web browser is a great candidate because there's a bunch of writes to various log files that are totally tiny but can slow down loading it and opening new tabs. If you've got the room for the OS, do it. Booting gets a bunch faster especially on windows 8 or 8.1 (and presumably on 10), and it can help prevent any annoying slowdowns.

 

For an example that covers a lot of different things, http://anandtech.com/show/3741/asus-u30jc-ssd covers the impacts of switching a pretty old laptop over to an old ssd with a decent breakdown of what affects things the most. I'd guess you're on something newer than a laptop nehalem i3, so if anything more of the slowdowns and bottlenecks will be your storage subsystem.

 

I'd personally tend to put things like games (and music if you need more room*) over on the platter drive because other than load times it doesn't hurt much. Something like tanks where loading in slowly's worst case can bite you can also be worth some spare space if you've got it.

 

*I make no promises for Win 7, but in Win 8(.1) you can open up computer, right click on any library, click properties, click the location tab, and move libraries around freely, which makes it painless to move them over to a platter drive. Music is either streamed quickly enough or it's not and it's pretty bulky en masse so it's a good candidtate to free up some room.

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So it sounds like I'm handicapping my new system running the O/S on a normal drive. 

 

Hmm how do I get windows off the regular drive and on the SSD when I get one?  I'll be moving that up on the priority list now. 

 

Since my main game is still WOT, I could see getting the SSD before the video card since the 660 I’m running is handling WOT maxed out no problem.

 

What are WOWS system reqs?

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O/S is a good thing to put on another drive, but moving is kind of a pain. Basically if you've got your install media you can pretty much throw a new install on and go from there. You can then copy the contents of your libraries over and it's pretty smooth sailing from there, the main pain is setting up installs again and getting the installations that like to have registry keys reinstalled. Steam games you can just copy over your steamapps folder into the steamapps folder of a new steam install. Tanks will probably want a new install.

 

Moving would be ugly and probably be a matter of drive cloning tools, I don't have experience there.

 

Even if I could tell you WOWS system requirements I'd put no faith in them, alpha and all.

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O/S is a good thing to put on another drive, but moving is kind of a pain. Basically if you've got your install media you can pretty much throw a new install on and go from there. You can then copy the contents of your libraries over and it's pretty smooth sailing from there, the main pain is setting up installs again and getting the installations that like to have registry keys reinstalled. Steam games you can just copy over your steamapps folder into the steamapps folder of a new steam install. Tanks will probably want a new install.

 

Moving would be ugly and probably be a matter of drive cloning tools, I don't have experience there.

 

Even if I could tell you WOWS system requirements I'd put no faith in them, alpha and all.

 

 

I have my windows disk, so a reinstall should be no problem.  Installing Windows went pretty fast actually. And going onto a SSD it'd prolly be faster. And as long as the Key is being used on the same mobo/proc all is good right?

 

How do I keep it from trying to boot of the old main disk if I want to use that as a secondary drive? In the old days you had to mess with jumpers on the drive, but I don't think SATA drives have those... 

 

The system was also randomly shutting down, or trying too, but I figured that out, the cat keeps walking on the case, and stepping on the power button. I moved a tank over it. 

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When you put a new install of an OS on a computer it should give you a choice between the two installed OSes in a nice little screen. I tend to try out new versions of windows, so I've seen it a bunch.

 

I'm pretty sure there's absolutely no problems with installing the same OS on the same motherboard, after all, what happens if your hard drive dies and you have to replace it?

 

Here's a bit of a microsoft guide to the whole process.

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When you put a new install of an OS on a computer it should give you a choice between the two installed OSes in a nice little screen. I tend to try out new versions of windows, so I've seen it a bunch.

 

I'm pretty sure there's absolutely no problems with installing the same OS on the same motherboard, after all, what happens if your hard drive dies and you have to replace it?

 

Here's a bit of a microsoft guide to the whole process.

 

So I should be able to take an old SATA drive, hook it up, boot off my Windows install, and then browse the drive and delete it's windows install or format the drive?

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