Need some advice on my best storage options

[iamchel]

A few months ago I decided to move from my previous system of a single large drive and move to a dedicated drive for my os and then a 1tb wd black drive for storage. All has been running fine but my os drive is slowly creeping to the 1gb free mark and that is not somewhere I want to be. My current set up is as follows (well the important stuff):

Intel i7 920 @ 2.6ghz
Asus Rampage II Extreme
6gb OCZ3P1600LV6GK

Now for the hard drives I have them set up as so:
40gb ssd Intel x25-v (os)
36gb raptor (currently have wow installed on it and nothing else)
1tb wd black wd1001fals (used for everything else)

The problem Ive run into is that while I try to not install anything besides windows 7 on it I still went ahead and installed minor software like office, adobe reader, office etc..and Im sitting at 1.7gbs free. What do you guys recommend I do in this situation? Buy a second intel drive and set them up in raid 0? Purchase another wd drive and use my ssd for only wow (this is the only game I play religiously and my current install is close to 20gb) and then use the raptor as my applications drive?

 

[FishAk]

First, if you go over about 32Gb on that Intel drive, your performance takes a huge hit, so moving to a bigger solution is the right track. Getting a second SSD and running in RAID would cause you to loose TRIM, and take a performance hit there as well.

I think the cleanest solution would be to buy a bigger SSD. The rouble is that third generation Intel drives are just around the corner, and they promise to drive the price of current SSDs south. If you can remove some of your programs from your current SSD long enough to wait out the lower prices, I would recommend that. If however you can't wait, I would recommend buying a SandForce based drive, since all evidence points to being able to fill the entire usable space without taking a performance hit.

If you don't have another use for the 40Gb drive, you could put your WoW install on it, and retire the Raptor to get rid of a lot of noise and heat.

You didn't mention anything about a backup drive, and if you don't have one, you are risking all your data.

 

[iamchel]

Hi Fish thanks for your reply. Ive been looking into my installed programs and Im a bit baffled as to where all my space has gone. Just by looking at the directories in my c: drive all of them are using 27gb total (program files, users, and windows) but when I go look at the disk itself its saying 37gb used... :s

Any idea where these extra 10 gigs can possibly be coming from? Also in terms of backup I dont have anything..I've never really looked into it to be honest since I always back up my work onto thumbdrives.

 

[jjmIII]

Fish's advice is pretty sound.

Pull the Raptor, and add a 2TB for back-ups.

 

[dmoney1980]

Hi Fish thanks for your reply. Ive been looking into my installed programs and Im a bit baffled as to where all my space has gone. Just by looking at the directories in my c: drive all of them are using 27gb total (program files, users, and windows) but when I go look at the disk itself its saying 37gb used... :s

Any idea where these extra 10 gigs can possibly be coming from? Also in terms of backup I dont have anything..I've never really looked into it to be honest since I always back up my work onto thumbdrives.

Do you have system restore enabled ? Hibernate ? If either are on that would be the reason

 

[iamchel]

It actually turns out that I never changed the paging and it was set to my ssd :s
Now I'm back down to 11gb free on my os drive.

 

[FishAk]

Download GetFolderSizefor free. It's a great program that lets you see the size of any directory by selecting it with the context menu. Point it at your C drive, and see what's taking up all your space.

 

[FishAk]

With 6Gb memory, you may not need to page, but if you do, there's no better place than the SSD.

To check how/if your system pages files:

Windows will grow the pagefile as needed but only resets/shrinks it on reboot/restart.

Set minimum pagefile size to 512MB. Maximum to 2GB. Restart. Run your computer in moderately demanding scenarios for a couple hours without rebooting. Check the size of pagefile.sys.

If pagefile.sys has never grown beyond 512MB, there's your answer. If it has grown to the maximum of 2GB, then you need to increase the maximum to something like 4GB and repeat the test.