SSD's own

[Harrypott]

Any thoughts on the size needed? I have an open bay in the laptop I use to game and I'm cheap. So, looking for advice on minimum comfortable size of an SSD and a specific model recommendation if anyone has one.

Thanks.

size: I went with a 64gb simply because it would fit a single copy of WoW on it, should be big enough for Cat, and It should serve ok to chuck in a media centre pc later to install windows on it and a few apps.

if you plan to put windows on it too then you probably want 128gb or more... Windows is awesome on a SSD, especially on a laptop but takes more effort to get it up and running.

[daviddoran]

you would still be limited to the 3gb/s bandwith of your motherboard, for maximum speed you would need to get a 6gb/s card

You misunderstood, my motherboard has 2 6Gb/s ports on it already. I was just wanting to know if the bandwidth is cumulative for the whole interface, or not.

[daviddoran]

As for size, I think 128GB ones are at a good price point now, and are large enough for most users to be their main drive for windows, and games. If you just want to put wow on one, grab a 32 gb one that has high read speed, and dont worry about the write speed. My plan is to keep buying larger/faster drives for my main pc, and trickle the older ones down to my backup pcs, the wifes pc, etc.

I'd recommend using hard drive cloning software if you have a good working install of windows going. I use Acronis, and it works great. Just plug in only your old drive and the new SSD, boot to the acronis CD, and clone from your old drive to your new one, then unhook the old one, put the new one in its place, hook up everything else, and you are golden. I also use acronis as my backup, to me it seems way more efficient than file based backup.

[Greythan]

David, you use Migrate Easy 7.0? Acronis is new to me and they have a lot of "home" products.

[daviddoran]

I use True Image, I've used the home versions as well as the enterprise versions. Best feature is the "universal restore" it lets you restore an image to dissimilar hardware, which is useful if you upgrade motherboards, and windows BSODs at boot.

[Catamer]

I hope you got a refund.

No, I didn't. No refunds, only replacement. It took two weeks to get a replacement for it and by that time I had purchased the intel drives. (who wants to go pc-less for two weeks) the replacement is brand now and still in the box with plastic wrap.

I was afraid to try it again since I didn't want to go through the hassle of reinstalling the O/S again.

[Greythan]

1. Open case, hook up SSD drive
2. Boot up, windows should see a new drive, need to initalize \ format it. This is done in disk management
3. Copy wow to it
4. modify ISBoxer or what ever software you use
5. play wow

Followed this advice. Newb question here, but I use Vista on my gaming laptop so is there any other optimization I should consider after installing a new 64g SSD? I'm thinking of the old windows swap file if that still applies in Vista, should that be moved to the SSD?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Followed this advice. Newb question here, but I use Vista on my gaming laptop so is there any other optimization I should consider after installing a new 64g SSD? I'm thinking of the old windows swap file if that still applies in Vista, should that be moved to the SSD?

Two comments:

1) Since you're using an OS without TRIM, as I understand it you need to partition the drive to leave about 15% empty. You can find references for this elsewhere.

2) Putting the swap file on it would probably help your OS general performance under heavy loads. I would have previously said never to put a swap file or your OS on an MLC drive but after seeing some better explanations of the math regarding MLC cell write lifetimes, I suspect you'll be able to buy cheap 1TB SLC SSDs before it wears itself out.

[Greythan]

I could upgrade the OS to Windows 7. (That's what I run on my home desktop, but I game on my Vista-based laptop.) Would that make a performance difference?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I could upgrade the OS to Windows 7. (That's what I run on my home desktop, but I game on my Vista-based laptop.) Would that make a performance difference?

Yes, because Vista sucks compared to Win7. Otherwise, the SSD performance will be about the same on both.