Crucial M4 128gb or 256gb

First off i wanna state the obvious the form were looking at for alienware m14x is 2.5', correct?

Anyway here is my dilemma i currently have a desktop, windows vista and i have 240gb used out of the 750gb hdd i have. For my m14x i will be getting the stock 500gb hdd, however i cannot decide to get the 128gb ssd or 256.

I have heard that with crucial your supposed to leave about 10% or so under the max, which puts me at 115gb for the 128 and 230gb for the 256gb. I will have wow on this laptop which is almost 32gb with all my addons and crap, i will have windows 7 home edition and Microsoft office and steam. I will have lots of music and videos and just general stuff i need saved etc. I would get the 256gb one np to be safe but it is indeed pricey and the 128gb one seems to fit the perfect price, so i was wondering based on what i would have prolly wow, steam couple possible other games, nothing crazy, and my microsoft office and such and all my files and programs i will need next year in college(majoring in computer science) i was wondering if it would be worth the extra 200$ for the 256gb thus keeping a disk drive, or else saving 200$ using the 128gb one and using the disk drive with my 500gb hdd for secondary storage? P.S i would kinda prefer to have a disk drive it just would make things easier, but idk how much im gonna need it really for college and what not so im at a toss up? I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with this and could help me make up my mind. Thanks.

 

well, first knock off about 10% of the 128/256 for formatting. i have an intel 320 160gig and it lets me start off @ 149gigs. i think most 120 gigs let you start @ ~ 111 gigs and 128 gigs @ ~119/120 gigs. i'm guessing a 25x gig ssd starts at about 230-235 after format.

next, start throwing away the trash. i had a lot of duplicate data from the last 10 years or so. i got everything backed up on a 32 gig intel x25-e with 5 gigs to spare. but you also have a lot more music than me and definitely games. trim what you don't need there, and maybe even encode your mp3 bit rates lower. it seems you would benefit more from a ssd master and opting out of your optical drive for a hdd in it's place. with that solution, you could definitely get a 128 gig ssd and use the hdd in optical drive. if you're like me and value an optical drive more in your laptop, you could still use a hdd for backup/games.

perhaps another solution would be to get a 128 gig ssd, and find a 64/96 gig ssd on craigslist on the cheap and use that as a portable backup. or do like me and suck it up. sata III performance gains are not astronomical or sata II. i settled for a sata II intel 320 with 160 gigs for $295 instead of spending $450-500 on a 256 gig ssd. my max spending for an ssd was $400 and that was stretching it.

the advice i would push though is get a 128/160 gig ssd and use a hdd for external back up but make sure all the crucial data on the hdd backup is BACKED UP. hdd's as external storage need to be stationary when powered on.

 

Thanks but what do u mean by this? Back up all my files on the hdd that il have in the optical drive? But how do i prevent it from moving when powering on?

 

you can take out your optical drive and put a hdd or sdd in its place. and i was saying what ever you put on external storage, back that data up on another hdd or optical disks. the data on a hdd is a moving platter. it can easily be messed up if you drop it or move it too hard. that's why i got a sdd to use for my external backup/storage/fast memory card. i wish i had a 64 gig ssd for external but i can't complain. i got a $300 32 gig sdd for $65.

 

still a bit confused. My plan is to use my SSD as my primary and then any files that dont need the use of the speed or take up too much space im gonna store them in my HDD when i have it in the optical drive using the hdd caddy. Are u saying i should back up those files that are gonna be on the HDD?

 

Whether your data files are on an SSD or an HDD (or the 'cloud' or any other single storage point)...

Yes, you should be backing up your important files to more than one storage medium.