cheap new drive for win7?

H

HarkovAdm

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 18, 2006
Messages
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Okay so I want to try out windoze 7 rc, but I don't feel like partitioning either of my drives so I am thinking just buy a cheap third drive and then I can have:

1.5tb for storage
250gb for xp and programs
new drive for win7 os

So I was thinking hey maybe I can get one of those 32gb ssd drives and use that for the operating system! A quick browse of newegg and I found a selection of 32gb ssd's, but I don't know if any of them are of good quality.

Then I read this article
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669&type=expert&pid=7

...which basically says that putting an os on a ssd will cause performance to degrade significantly over time until you reformat the drive and install again, which doesn't sound fun.

I guess what I am wondering is does anyone use a small ssd costing ~$100 for their os? Does that make sense? As far as I know even a heavily fragmented SSD might perform better than a new 7200rpm drive(?) And if you would use a 32gb ssd for the os, which one is the best? Would it make more sense just to buy another 7200 rpm drive? I would consider partitioning my 250gb drive but it is not exactly the fastest drive and I am tired of my extremely slow xp startup. I'm not really interested in raid or in spending more than $100. Thanks for the suggestions :)
 
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1) Do a search
2) OCZ Vertex 30gb is the closest to your budget that is a serious performer.
 
Get a 30 gig Vertex and you will be just fine.

An SSD has routines built into the controller to spread the data evenly over the entire drive to help prevent you from wearing out 1 portion if the drive too quickly. After it has written to the entire drive, it has to erase some of the previously written to areas to write to them a second time. That is the performance degradation you will see with an SSD.

That issue does not affect the read speed of the SSD which is what you do most of the time. There is something called the TRIM command which will completely mitigate the problem eventually, at the expense of removing your ability to undelete files. At some point, Win 7 will include support of this function. I am not sure if the current RC do though.

I have used SSDs and HDs on several identical systems, and I will never willingly install a HD as an OS drive in any of my systems ever again.

Don
 
On my daily use system, I have 4 X 30 gig OCZ Solids connected to a Perc 5i caching controller running off of WinXP. This setup caps the read speed at 380 MB/sec with only 3 drives, but I have no problems with slow writes because of the 256 meg of cache on the controller.

My newer system has 3 X 60 gig Ptriot Warps connected to a ICH10R running Vista 64. I am prolly going to switch that setup over to Vertex drives in a month or so before I switch over to it for my main system. I just use it to play games right now.

I keep putting off updating my sig. I have to get to that one of these days.

Don
 
alright thanks for all the advice guys, it seems that [H] loves the vertex so I'll check it out. I'm currently using xp 32 and will likely move to win7 x64
 
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