Pondering M17X hard drive setups, any opinions?

I'm planning on getting a new M17X, Now I'm contemplating which hard drive setup. I like the setup on my 1720. I use one drive to run the programs, and so it is a 7200 RPM, and the other drive like a storage drive. It holds all pics, vids, docs, ect. and so it's a 500GB 5400RPM. Now with the M17X I'm thinking a 500gb 7200 RPM main drive for the programs and such to be installed on, and a 640 GB 5400 RPM drive for my storage drive. I could also go for max space and get two 640 GB drives. Another interesting thing is SSDs. I have read a little about SSDs and read that they slow down once all the space on them has been written on, and the drive then has to erase "pages" in blocks in order to rewrite and so after time the slow down. While it would be nice to have a fast drive such as an SSD, to start up the computer faster, load programs faster, ect, but I also like a lot of space. I'm not really concerned with RAID because I back up my things on an external regularly, and also like the idea have having seperate drives, this way if the main one goes down, I still have my stuff. So what are your experiences? Any suggestions or advice?

Also I'm going to be putting in the 8GB DDR3 1333MHZ RAM, QX9300, SLI ATI 4870 GPU. So it should be a pretty good gaming machine to go along with the HDD space or speed. Haven't decided yet...

 

I picked the Intel 128gb SSD to run my OS/main drive, and the 500gb WD Black 7200rpm for my secondary storage drive.

 

How are you liking the SSD? What is your boot time? My 1720 will fully boot in about 50 sec. with a 7200rpm 320gb drive.

 

Unless you have a good reason, do NOT get 8GB of RAM. Gamers need nothing more than 4GB, it's a waste of money for more.

I'd recommend a fairly spacious SSD for primary instead of wasting money on the RAM.

SSDs do slow down over time but only with write speeds. This is due to the whole 'page' thing you're talking about; SSDs can write to 4KB blocks (I think it's 4KB) but can only erase (to re-write) 512KB blocks. So, once it's full, that can slow down file writing. However, unlike with hard drives, read times are completely uneffected, plus SSDs never need to be defragmented.

Boot times with SSDs are around 10 to 20 seconds in most cases, far faster than any hard drives.

My setup is soon going to be a 128GB/160GB fast SSD with my current 320GB 7200RPM hard drive in the second slot for mass storage, you might want to take a similar route just with bigger capacities.

 

Evil you bring up a good point. I can always upgrade later on if i need it. What are some good reputable Large Capacity SSDs? Lookin particularly at the 256GB as that is the largest SSD I have found. Also I can save money by just getting the 256GB SSD straight from Dell at $400 vs. $595 which is the cheapest at newegg. How is the 256 that dell sends with the M17X?

Basically what it comes down to, I can get everything at dell cheaper then elsewhere except the processor from my shopping around. I think. Thats if I stick with 4GB Memory.

 

The Intel X25-M is reputed as one of the most reliable and fastest drives in the mainstream SSD market. I think it comes in a 320GB version as well, but expect to dish out a lot of money for it (although, not much more if anything at all above the price for an upgrade to 8GB) Other good SSDs are the g.Skill Falcon (I think I got that name right) and the OCZ Vertex/Vertex Turbo drives.

Try to get 1066MHz RAM if you can, due to the processor's FSB speed 1333MHz RAM runs at 1066MHz anyway so it's not worth paying the extra money.

 

Ahh thanks for that bit of info. No need in having RAM that can run to it's full potential.

 

I've heard some bad things about SSDs in general, so I try to avoid them for now until they get cheaper and more mainstream with less glitches (I'm sure they're fine now, yet I still wait because I'm like that...). I'm content with 2x320GB in RAID 0. Performance is good enough for me.

Also, on my desktop I can get it to use about 6GB of RAM if I try. Usually involves running Crysis in the background while doing some HD Video Editing. 4GB is PLENTY.