alienware M17x R4 SSD shopping,any pro-tips or help?

before someone here jumps to conclusions,I just want to clear a few things out.

- this might be in the wrong section or whatnot,so whoever's in charge (mods),if it is,sorry. a bit new here ._.

- the title is a bit misleading but I can't really put it clearer... so moving on.

I just bought an AW laptop from some classifieds (kijiji),specs are :

- nvidia GTX 660M 2gb

- 8gb's of RAM

- 500gb HD

- core i7 3610m 2.30ghz (not sure for that,but I know it is ivy-bridge clocked at 2.30ghz)

and I had this SSD in mind,from crucial,link is

http://www.futureshop.ca/fr-CA/prod...spx?path=707cc35859bfa035dbffb3d0895f3c93fr02

and I wanted to use one partition for win7 and the rest for the games/tools I use the most.

two questions,is that SSD good? and how would I partition half of the SSD for win7 and install it ONLY there?

tl;dr - alienware m17x r4,want crucial M500 240gb SSD inside,windows 7 on half of SSD,games on other half.

thanks in advance.

EDIT - I finally made up my mind and I chose for a more traditional SSD and HDD config where my games go on my HDD and my apps and win7 goes in the SSD. after testing GTA IV (my favorite game as you can probably tell) on a newer alienware 17 R1 display model with one,my conclusions were that it wasn't a good enough difference to be worth the struggle of partitioning.

 

Welcome to the forum. The Crucial will fit and is a pretty good drive for the price.

I am going from memory here so if I am not 100% correct forgive me. When you start the clean install of Windows you will have the option to do an advanced setup. It is from the Advanced setup that you can format and create your partitions.

 

thanks for the info. just one more question ; does the m17x r4 accept SATA II,SATA III or both?

 

All of the m17xR4's bays (primary, secondary, and mSATA) aside from the ODD bay (DVD drive) run at SATA III; they are backwards compatible with SATA II and SATA I.
The ODD bay runs at SATA II.
I would not do 2 partitions for the SSD and leave it as is as there isn't much gained from splitting the SSD into 2. I would also keep the HDD for additional storage, mainly for games.

 

I would second what Game7a1 said. I prefer to keep my drives without partitions and sort my data and programs on to the drives by my use of the them. For example I use my OS drive as my boot and work drive and I back that one up weekly. The D Drive I use for games and movies and I back that up monthly. The reason is if you have a drive failure it makes the recovery process a little less complicated.

 

I would get a better SSD then the M4... I'd suggest something like the Sandisk 240GB Extreme II/Pro or Samsung 840 Evo / 850 Pro...

 

I'll be honest,I only have a budget of $180 CAD for this SSD,and the only 840 evos I can have are the 1tb refurb fads ($450 CAD).

@frozen if I'd have to waste a few more minutes on recovering bad sectors or w/e,then so be it. no hard feelings,though ; I do believe what game said,it's just that the drive that came with this laptop is somewhat old (one and a half years old) and I'm not a sucker for a freezing taskbar...

edit - if this laptop has an mSATA port,would it be a better option to take one of my old mSATA drives (collected over the years),put that one in and use the 2.5" SSD for its original purple minus the windows partition?

 

If you have an mSATA (provided that it is at least 60 GB), you can go ahead and use it as a boot drive. If you still want to get a separate SSD for your important tools and games, that's fine too. Actually, that would help go beyond and "serve" the two partitions goal you have in mind.

 

isn't windows 7 closer to ~30 gigabytes of space?

 

I think so, but you can manage Windows on a 60 GB mSATA, but it just isn't recommended. I did give my old 64 GB mSATA cache Win7, and it worked fine.
It is preferable to have a more spacious SSD as a boot drive.

 

I know I'm taking this too far (excuse my tech illiteracy),but how much space does windows 7 take with the SWAP memory (or w/e it's called)?