Questions about adding SSD; GA-Z68X-UD3-B3

[Beau]

I am using an aging 500 GB Western Digital SATA hard drive in my recent build. Presently only 50 GBs is being used, including Win7. I don't anticipate even doubling that in the future. I store most docs, pictures, etc. on my external hard drive and online. This drive is the weakest part of my system, giving low scores.

I was thinking of adding a SSD in the 120 GB range and continuing totally with it for Windows  AND all programs, or using the WD hard drive with it for extra stuff. From my understand SSDs have a high failure rate and a very short life expectancy of maybe only a couple of years with 8 hr/day use. Leaning more towards Intel for more reliability and life.

What are your comments and opinions? Would I be better off just buying another regular SATA HD with better specs.? If this is in the wrong forum I apologize but there may be compatibility problems with this motherboard and certain SSDs and controllers. I do have Marvel driver and storage controller installed but I understand that is problematic. I am a little confused about SATA SSD 2 and 3 and their differences and compatibility with my board.

I do a lot of PhotoShop. I am not that interested in boot times. I can do full backup cloning to my external hard drive.

For those that used a SSD for Windows only how do programs on another hard drive write registry entries and other stuff  to the SSD?

Thanks. 

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

To be perfectly honest SSDs havenm't really been around and in constant use for long enough to be able to say with any reasonable amount of accuracy how long they will last but they are improving all the time. Also you have to treat them differently to a magnetic drive.

Unlike the old hard drives they have a physical limit on how many times each point can be written to. This is why it is not good to run programs like disk defragmenters etc. Apart from that a SSD doesn't have any problem with where the data is stored on its memory chips.This is the same reason for not having a swapfile (pagefile) running on it. If you have enough RAM you can disable it altogether or put it on another drive.

In your type of usage style the best thing to do would be to get your SSD and use it as  the boot drive (C) and keep your old drive as  a data drive (D). Also because of your Photoshop usage get a load more memory. You can't have enough for that and it is cheap at the moment. If you have over 8GB you can quite happily disable the swapfile too. I would suggest at least 16GB would make a huge difference. I have just bought some more and 16Gigs cost me £85 for Corsair Vengeance DDR3.

Run the SSD controller in AHCI mode for better performance and make sure that TRIM is enbled to keep your new drive healthy. This should give you years of trouble free and fast disk access.

[Beau]

Thanks again.

So I should look at a much smaller SSD in the 30-40 GB range if I'm only using it as a boot drive with the OS?

Also the writes to the operating system are minimal for the longevity of the drive? From reading various buyer reviews quite a few report DOA's and failures of SSDs.

My old drive, being on the slow side, will not be a problem or should I also get a faster (low capacity) one to go along with the SSD?

You are correct about Photoshop requiring a lot of memory. I've run out of memory on occasion on big projects with 4GB RAM, Win7 32-bit. I've even shut down a lot of memory hogging stuff (example anti-virus) to just get through. Since the 4 GB limitation looks like I need to install a 64-bit Win 7 upgrade to install more, right?

[Dark Mantis]

Yes I am afraid an upgrade to 64 bit is the only way forward for you there. It isn't as painful as it sounds though and everything goes quite smoothly now. In fact it is certainly the way forward and I wil be surprised to find anybody running 32 bit in a year or two.

As for the drive it is purely up to you and how confident you feel about them. I don't have a problem personally and expect mine to last for several years at least. Mine take a hammering too in some ways. Just make sure that you buy a good make/model in the first place.

Your original hard drive should do you for now although at the prices they are it hardly seems worth struggling on with it. I just had a couple of Samsung F3s 1 TB each delivered today and they came in at under £40 each.

[Beau]

Thank you. I'm going shopping.   

[Dark Mantis]

Good luck with your purchases and have fun.

[Aussie Allan]

  Photoshop......Hungry.......CS5 .....more so........64bit.......CS5 say Yum,Yum..........Memory cheap........CS5 say Yum,Yum.....

  SSD.......CS5 say "I luv You"...........look at OCZ 120Gb...Agility or Virtex3s.......Very well priced and CS will literally fly.

  Aussie Allan

[Beau]

  Photoshop......Hungry.......CS5 .....more so........64bit.......CS5 say Yum,Yum..........Memory cheap........CS5 say Yum,Yum.....

  SSD.......CS5 say "I luv You"...........look at OCZ 120Gb...Agility or Virtex3s.......Very well priced and CS will literally fly.

  Aussie Allan