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SSD how big do you really need?


pkilway

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Looking at starting to peice together a new pc. I'm really intrigued by the new SSD technology. It seems most are just using SSD's as OS drives and then using a larger SATA hard drive as the primary storage for files, games, video, mp3's, etc.

 

So, with that in mind, how big of an SSD do you really need to buy to use as a boot drive for your OS? It doesn't make much sense to by a $500 256GB SSD drive if most of the files are going to be on a second non-SSD hard drive.

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Well with one that big you wouldn't have to run off of a secondary HDD

Honestly I'd personally never buy smaller than a 128GB and just be conservative with installing stuff on it...and then not run other programs off of a second HDD. That way you get the full experience of the SSD IMHO, I don't understand why people buy 32GB or 64GB SSDs and then still run other stuff off of a regular HDD. Kills half of the point

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I myself want to run 2 60gb ssd's in raid 0. I know there is no trim support for raid 0 but i have heard that the performance degradation is not that bad, besides i reinstall every 6 months or so. So in answer to your question i would go with a minimum 128 gbs for your windows install (personal preference).

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I have 2 80GB Intel SSD in RAID 0. I use it for my OS and for Steam, and I don't have enough space. Now granted my Steam folder is pretty big, but still..... So when it comes to SSD'd I would go as big as you can afford. If you only have your OS in a small SSD then you will see fast boot times, but if all of your commonly used programs are still sitting on a HDD then you will still see the same load times coming off of the mech drive! So really the only person who can possibly know what size SSD you need is you ;) Windows7 takes up close to 20GB, not sure what your OS is, but add that to a list of all the programs you use on a regular basis and would want on your SSD, and figure out how much space you will need!

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Only because I have SQL Server, Visual Studios, and Video editing software, I need 128GB at the least for my main gig. I put all my games on my 4 HDD RAID 10 array, and it loads games just as fast as my SSD. On my laptop, I also need 128GB since I don't have a secondary drive for storage on it.

 

Otherwise, I can easily get away with 64GB. Just as long as you have an HDD RAID array, size for your OS/App SSD doesn't matter too much. My girlfriend could get away with a 32GB SSD. All I put on it was her OS and Microsoft Office, and a few other apps. The rest I put on 2 HDD RAID 1. Her 64GB SSD still has like 44GB free space.

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