Should I buy SSDs for my desktops?

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hairy1

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#102970 27-May-2012 17:17

Howdy all,

I have a couple of desktops which are both around 2 years old and going pretty well.

Recently I sprung for an ASUS Ultrabook with an SSD and am loving the instant on, battery life and performance that the SSD provides.

I was thinking about upgrading the hard drives in the desktops with a couple of SSD's. I thought about putting the OS and some of the applications on the SSD and leaving the traditional HDD's in there for the data and movies. Has anyone done this? Is it worth the hassle? Obviuosly buying SSD's to provide all the storage is out of the price range...

Cheers, Matt.

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#631058 27-May-2012 17:21

A resounding YES!

YES.
YES.
YES!

If you can afford it, that is. ;)

EDIT: And in the configuration you have suggested. SSD for OS plus Apps, and the other drives for Data etc.
Have been running this config for about a couple of years now and definitely not regretting it.

hairy1

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#631060 27-May-2012 17:24

OK. So I take it that is a Yes then? Then the question is I have to get something big enough to hold Windows and all the applications?

How big is yours? (the SSD that is!)

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Digmarx

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#631062 27-May-2012 17:25

I recently built my first SSD system. An AMD APU-based HTPC with a Crucial M4 64 gig SSD as the only physical drive. All media is played off my home server over gigabit ethernet. I love the boot/resume from standby time and XBMC positively flies. I reckon SSD is the way to go. I'll certainly be using SSDs for OS drives on any future builds.

dontpanic42

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#631063 27-May-2012 17:28

hairy1: OK. So I take it that is a Yes then? Then the question is I have to get something big enough to hold Windows and all the applications?

How big is yours? (the SSD that is!)

lol... I purchased one of the original Intel X25M models, so it's only 80GB (74GB really).
I find it's more than enough for the usual slew of Apps and an OS.
Something 128GB+ would be nice, but I honestly don't really need it.

hairy1

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#631068 27-May-2012 17:32

Just looking at the prices it looks like 64 GB is the way to go as SATA III goes through the rough from 128 GB up.... Hmmm...

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dontpanic42

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#631078 27-May-2012 17:40

I'm currently only using ~55GB of the 74GB available to me.
However, for example, if you were to load on a full Adobe Creative Suite at about 14GB total, it might be a different story.
Or if you loaded a decent game on, things might get a little cramped for space. ;)

One thing I'm not that keen on is the fact that Steam won't allow you to change the install path for any games downloaded, so you end up installing to the SSD.
Perhaps this has changed? I must Google that.

EDIT: BTW, I paid about $450 for my mere 80GB, back in the day. I definitely haven't regretted it, though.

Cadriel

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#631089 27-May-2012 17:50

Just install steam wherever you want. That way you control where the steam games go.

I've got a similar setup with a new machine I built recently. Mine's a Crucial 128GB.

In any case - there's a couple of things you can do to free up some significant amount of space.

1) Disable your hiberfil.sys. In other words, disable hibernate. Since you have an SSD - you don't really need that anymore. This isn't a requirement, but it saves a LOT of space.

2) If you have a large amount of RAM, your page file will be taking up a lot of space. The more RAM you have, then the better the reason to go ahead with this tweak. And that is to move your page file to another HDD instead of the SSD. Windows 7 by default creates the page file to be the same as your RAM. In my case, I have 16GB of RAM - so my page file was 16GB, and NEVER got used. So - I moved it to my D: drive and let windows manage it.

Using the above two tweaks I was above to free up an additional ~20GB on my SSD with no performance hits whatsoever.

Other than that - all of my games, applications and OS are on my SSD. Anything else is either streamed or stored on another traditional drive in the machine.

Hatch

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kyhwana2

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#631102 27-May-2012 18:08

YES. OMG YES.
I've got a 160GB intel 320. Lots of space for windows + apps/current games and my home directory.

th3r3turn

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#631108 27-May-2012 18:18

dontpanic42:
hairy1: OK. So I take it that is a Yes then? Then the question is I have to get something big enough to hold Windows and all the applications?

How big is yours? (the SSD that is!)

lol... I purchased one of the original Intel X25M models, so it's only 80GB (74GB really).
I find it's more than enough for the usual slew of Apps and an OS.
Something 128GB+ would be nice, but I honestly don't really need it.

had a 60gig then got a 120gig. 120gig is the perfect size.

freitasm

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#631123 27-May-2012 18:38

I have a Crucial C300 256GB on my desktop PC. It boots and it's ready to use in about fifteen seconds (after POST). This is the only fixed drive I have - I also have another 2.5TB on two USB drives, mainly used to store software installed (and the 2TB drive is used permanently for Acronis image backup).

hellonearthisman

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#631124 27-May-2012 18:42

Yes, 120GB would be good for a start, 2x 120GB in raid would be OMG FAST.

If you can hang out until xmass you will find the price then will be AWESOME, not saying the prices now are not good, but they will get much better over the next 6 months.

120GB now and a 2nd 4 xmass would make me very envious.

freitasm

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#631125 27-May-2012 18:44

I have a dual proc Xeon server here with 128GB RAM and 2x Intel 200GB SSD... The Geekzone virtual machine boots in seconds - in real life the production server with HDD takes minutes to boot. I would love to have this permanently ;)

ChevronX

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#631143 27-May-2012 19:09

I have heard that SSDs are one of the best things you can do to upgrade your computer, good to know it sounds good. Will have to be something I put money away for.

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