A new SSD for a workstation, or re use Crucial M4?

r4sh1d

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Feb 21, 2012
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I'm building a pc for my wife's graduate school work (autocad, light photoshop, sketchup, 3ds max design).

Specs: Ryzen 1700, Gigabyte B350 Gaming 3, 32GB RAM.


I'm thinking, instead of buying her a new SSD or M2, I'd use my Crucial M4 256GB for OS & documents + my ancient Intel 320 160GB for applications or something, then get myself a new 1TB for my gaming rig.

How bad of an idea is this :/ ?
 
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FFFF

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Unless you checked both drive's SMART data and the value for Reallocated Sectors Count changed from 0, there's no problem at all using old SSDs especially ones using MLC NAND. I say go ahead and make good use of them.
 

DaveSimmons

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Agreed, the SSDs will probably still last longer than she'll want to use that PC.

Do buy an external 1 TB USB drive for backups though, and use it. And/or set up cloud backup somewhere.

Any PC can fail, and some failures will destroy her data. There's also human error in saving over the wrong file, deleting something by mistake, and so on. Plus the ransomware that infects and encrypts your drives.
 
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r4sh1d

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Thanks for input, but sorry if I wasn't clear, I meant in terms of them being older Gen SSD's will bottleneck the system while rendering, heavy system I/O ...etc

The work files are backed up to Google drive daily, her system will be backed up to my machine weekly (gaming/12TB server)+ an offline(ed) external HDD every other week manually, I learned the hard way.
 

FFFF

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Thanks for input, but sorry if I wasn't clear, I meant in terms of them being older Gen SSD's will bottleneck the system while rendering, heavy system I/O ...etc

Well now that I think about it more Intel 320 is SATA 2 only so there might be some bottleneck there and a 256GB SSD is pretty cheap right now so yeah, on second thought maybe you should get your wife a new SSD to use with applications like AutoCAD, Photoshop and 3ds Max.
 
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DaveSimmons

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If the SATA 2 Intel drive was the OS and installs drive and the Crucial was the data / documents / work drive that wouldn't be an issue except maybe in taking slightly longer to boot.

If she will run everything out of the Documents folder then using the Crucial as C: and just using the intel as D: for backups or misc. (iTunes folder?) then it being SATA 2 won't really matter.
 
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r4sh1d

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Thanks for the replies, I'll go ahead and install the OS on the crucial drive for the OS & everything, will see how that works (once I receive the RAM and complete the build). I'll keep the intel drive plugged in in case we needed extra storage. Currently she's using a XPS 13 (256GB NVME) and it's almost half full. All of the itunes/music/videos...etc are on my machine.

I can grab a new SSD for this build, but I know I'll just retire the ones I have and leave them in the closet, but would rather put them in good use.
 
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