N00b SSD Question

[stahlhart]

...now that I've caved and decided to get one. :awe: Since the best way to treat one of these is apparently to minimize writing to it any more than necessary (at least that's what I got from reading the FAQ), what are owners typically doing to deal with operating system temporary files, browser cache, Outlook personal storage folders, etc. -- stuff besides the swap file that's getting written and deleted frequently? Do you point to a location on the HDD (data) drive for this? Is there a performance hit?

 

[Krynj]

When I got mine, I made absolutely no changes to the OS, page file, or cache preferences. According to the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics, I've been using my drive for about 460 days, and I haven't experienced a single problem yet. And the media wearout indicator shows my drive at 97% after about 4.8TB of data has passed through it.

However, on my current system, I did disable the page file, simply because I have 16GB of RAM, so pagefile.sys also took up 16GB. 16GB is very valuable on an 80GB drive.

If you're using other drives to store cache/temporary files, you could possibly be taking a performance hit, simply because the OS is waiting on the magnetic drive to seek and spin up.

Just leave everything as is. You'll be fine.

 

[stahlhart]

Thanks much for the feedback. I am planning on 120Gb for the SSD and 8Gb of RAM, so I'm thinking I should have enough space to retain the page file.

The matter of how long the drive will last I guess was the main sticking point for me and why I was holding off initially, but as I read more I'm becoming less concerned about this -- I'll just make sure to have a better backup strategy in place going forward than I have in the past.

 

[Krynj]

Having adequate backups is a good idea no matter what type of HDD configuration you have. Doesn't take much to burn a few backup DVD/CDs with your sensitive data.

 

[thescreensavers]

Get an Intel Drive, its the least likely to die on you.

 

[stahlhart]

Get an Intel Drive, its the least likely to die on you.

That's what I was planning on, the X-25M G2. Placing the order as soon as the tax refund arrives (any day now).

 

[LokutusofBorg]

If you max out your SATA bus and write constantly to your SSD 24/7 your drive will die in like 10 years or something. I'm almost making that up.

Seriously, there is zero concern about wearing your drive out by writing to it. Just partition it to the full size and install Windows and forget about it.

 

[jae]

Lol.. 10 years for a hard drive wouldn't be that bad anyway.. and at that point its gonna be a lot slower than the cheap drives on the market. I use an old ass 40 GB from 2000-2001 as my /home mountpoint.. just because.. I don't care.