My son had me add a 512mb SSD drive to his PC. Now, if he puts just his games on this drive, will they run faster?
No. You should use that as your system volume. That's where you will see the biggest performance gains.
^^ and leave a 512gb drive empty? You don't really need to keep that much free space on a modern SSD to keep performance high. Install all your programs/games etc on it and enjoy the launch speed of everything. You paid big bucks for a 512GB SSD so why not use it?
Newegg had a sale during the 4th. Sorry, I meant a 512 gb drive. I also installed a EVGA GTX680 4G R. Win 7 is running on his Raptor drive and he wanted to run all of his games from the new SSD. I was just curious if the games would run and load faster? The rest of his PC build is about a year old. Just took out his Radeon 5780's and the lone GTX680 runs circles around them.
You definitively want to install win7 on the ssd drive, would be ridiculous not to, that is where you'll see the performance
Ok then I will pass it on. Now if I do as you've suggested and then install games on his Raptor drive, will I see an improvement in performance with the games or, are you suggesting load everything on just the SSD and forget about the other drives? I'm not trying to be dense. I just don't want to buy another SSD if I don't need to. 512gb is pushing it for space according to him.
Another option be, SRT caching if you have a Z68 board. It works alot better with smaller SSD like 64 to 120 gig. You can always partition the SSD. You will not see drastic speed increase first time. But after frequent use of program/games, they will get faster. And might have to boot computer often for the files to get cache, and then you will see increase boot time too. You do need to put them in raid setup in order to use SRT.
Its hard to say exactly how much free space you should leave but I would say about 5% should be enough but its not something I personally worry about since I never fill my boot drive to 95% capacity anyway. All SSD's have extra NAND memory for over provisioning, garbage collection and wear leveling. Some SSD's have more than others, I know Intel is known for having lots of extra NAND available on the drive for the controller to use. Hitatchi has a SSD joint developed by Intel for the enterprise market where the 400GB model has ~700GB of actual NAND for just that reason. But the planned usage for those drives would be reading/writing terabytes of data to it per day so that is an extreme example.
Win 7, utility programs (AV, browser, photoshop and the like), as many games as will fit (but not totally full as Ali says)--> SSD. Put all the archive and media on the Raptor. It's OK to use SSD and a spinner drive in the same rig.
get a storage drive, but ssd is def better for loading times, but performance not really (or do what jzl said) redirect all the paths to storage drive win 7 is a must for TRIM, unless he plans on doing it manually.
Ali knows his shit! Thanks for the info. I leave 20+ GB free on mine, all of my data is on platter drives which makes it easy.
