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Using two SSDs - which one for the OS?

C

Cirventhor

Junior Member
I bought a Crucial M4 (128 GB) 6 months ago, and found that it got filled up rather faster than I originally thought it would, so I recently ordered a Samsung 830 (256 GB).

My question is rather simple - which of these drives is the best one to use as the main/OS drive? I originally thought that the 830 would be best, seeing as it's a newer and faster drive than the M4, but using the smaller M4 drive for the OS would have the added benefit of not having to wipe the larger drive when formatting the system. Then I could use the 830 for games, and the M4 for OS/multimedia.

Which of the drives would you suggest I use for the OS? Is there any tangible benefits of having the OS on the 830 compared to the M4?

Thanks.
 
Welcome to the forums Cirv,

You really will not notice any difference using either or as your main drive even thou Samsung technically is a faster drive. Are you using a spindal drive for your files and such and using your ssd's for games/programs/os? I would imagine you have a newer motherboard with Sata3, correct?
 
Thanks!

Yeah, I've got an ASUS P8Z68-V PRO board with 2x Intel SATA 3 and 2x Marvell SATA 3 connections.

I've got a third spindal drive (WD Black 640 GB) that I use for storage. Is there any benefit in splitting content between the two SSDs, so that neither are completely filled up (as I recall SSDs performs better when not completely filled)?
 
Last edited:
Cirventhor said:
Thanks!... Is there any benefit in splitting content between the two SSDs, so that neither are completely filled up (as I recall SSDs performs better when not completely filled)?
Click to expand...

Good point. Fact is, that applies to ALL drives, spindle and SSD.
 
That is always good advice, but any modern ssd is so much faster than any hdd that you might want to look at putting everything on the ssd's first. In fact, I was able to go completely ssd about 4 months ago, and I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll never have to go back. At worst, I'll probably end up getting an external hdd with esata or usb 3.0 to hold any potential "large and little used" programs in my future, it's just so much more enjoyable using ssd 24/7.

My advice would be to use the smaller ssd for your OS, etc. You should have 119gb usable on that drive, fill it up to around 100gb and then start putting everyhing else on the samsung.
 
I just did the reverse in regard to sizing. I've been using a M4 256GB for my OS + Apps, but I had 170GB free. I ordered one of the 830 128GB SSDs that were on sale, and I cloned my OS to that drive and put my games on the M4. Now I've got ~50GB free on the 128GB drive with it being my OS drive, and as long as I keep above 15-20GB free on the OS drive, I'm pretty satisfied.
 
There is always the option of JBOD which would give you a total capacity of 384GB. You don't get any performance improvements but the drives will appear as one volume, which makes organizing data a lot easier.
 
Samsung - Primary.
M4 partitioned. Use half for Intel RST (WD Black) and other half as a cache/scratch drive.
 
The Samsung, but simply because of size. 240-256GB are the highest performing SSDs in any product line.
 
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