Hard Drive 1 vs Hard Drive 2

Hard Drive Set 1: Operating System: 1x (120GB Solid State (By: Intel) (Model: 320 Series)
Set 1 Raid Options: - No Thanks
Hard Drive Set 2: Multimedia\Data: 1x (1TB Western Digital Caviar (7200 RPM) (64MB Cache) (Model: Black Edition)
I have two drives: one for games, OS, etc and the other for Data. I quickly learned just by adding Total War Napoleon and Windows Office, that I almost got up to 50% of the 120 GB hard drive space for Hard Drive Set 1.

you want a ssd as your primary drive since it will boot windows in less than 15 seconds :)

Originally posted by Grape I have the SSD as my primary drive for the OS and Games. Am I able to install Microsoft Office on the secondary drive then, thus freeing up space on the SSD? I will then be able to operate MS Office in the general manner?     thx

You can fill up your ssd pretty much, its not like a hdd don't worry about it.

I would not install games/apps that use regkeys on a different hdd, if your hdd 2 goes bad, you will need to reinstall everything on that hdd.

ssd do more then just load games faster, they take care of performance stutter you don't realize is from hdd, and they bring better min fps depending on the games:



in the above chart you see the game, the red on top is veloci raptor and the blue is x25 intel, you see the improvement, the intel 320 is even better then the x25.

at the end of the day all apps/games will benefit from ssds speeds, and not just from loading, that is why we told you to get the ssd, so that you can put os/apps/games on it.

ssd helps with load times yes, but there are also many other areas it helps, read/write/seek, these will all make a difference and why we recommend getting a ssd and putting os/apps/games on it, otherwise we would recommend a 40GB ssd for the os and tell you gusy to put the rest on the hdd.

you are at only 50% on the ssd, you got plenty of room left, use it.



Edited by DST4ME - 13 Jun 2011 at 2:43am

Originally posted by RiceEatin2000GT i dont see any freezing and hitching on my system what so ever. So when people use crappy 1tb 50$ drives as a main theyre gonna see horrible freezes and hitches? i dont think so

It depends largely on the game, there are some that have the really bad habit of constantly loading new content on fly from the HDD instead of doing it ahead of time, creating hitching and FPS drops. Games that come to mind on this are Crysis and the STALKER series, they constantly stream from the HDD in the middle of play, and it's very noticeable.

I don't have them on hand, but I've seen some minimum FPS comparisons for Crysis and they are significantly higher on a SSD versus a HDD. And with the STALKER series I can tell you from first hand experience after almost 600 hours of game play between the three games (about half of which was on HDDs, half on SSDs) that they are absolutely notorious for hitching and outright freezing for long periods of time when loading data when approaching some areas (and will happen each and every time you cross said areas). There's still a bit of it even on a SSD, but the frequency and severity of it is remarkably reduced compared to on a HDD.

I'm a very impatient person, and as a very active gamer frequent and/or long load times will just drive me completely up a wall, I can't stand them. SSDs were probably the best thing to happen to games in a long time, I will never go back to having games on a conventional HDD.

As dragoon mentioned not all games are the same, perhaps you don't see it for your use, but it does not mean others won't with other games.

Personally just on performance form os/apps, I would not go back to hdd either, and I don't even have the best ssd yet, lol.