Driving me a little crazy (storage)

So the Intel 320 in my laptop has 148GB total space, with 33.6GB free after deleting a few things recently. Knowing that SSD performance nose-dives after a certain percentage of the drive is full, I'm been thinking about how I should try to expand my storage space, especially since I'd like to have everything on my laptop (right now, I have videos and games on an external drive). I'm even more tempted with the Crucial M4, Samsung 830, and now Intel 330 firesales.

So as far as I see, I have these options:

• Buy an Ultrabay Adapter and replace DVD drive, stick my 500GB HDD in that. Switch to the 320GB HDD as my primary external backup drive.
• Buy Adapter, move the 320 to that, and buy the 330/830/M4 as my main drive. Keep using the HDD as an external for backups as I am currently doing.
• wait until the 512GB SSDs are cheap, and use that as my sole drive (probably a looong wait)

I'm not sure how well protected the HDD will be if I choose that option, since I don't baby my W520 and tend to toss it onto the bed/couch when I want to lay down and compute, I leave my laptop on when I have it in my bookbag and travel, etc.

I currently have Win7Pro installed, several programs (a few often-played games, MATLAB, Office and OpenOffice, iTunes, VMWare, etc.), Documents takes up 10.5GB, Music takes another 10GB, and Pictures takes up a few GBs. On my 500GB HDD, I have 31GB of installed applications, and 130GB of video, as well as about 5GB of random, unsorted stuff.

So what do you guys think is a good idea? Should I pounce on these firesales, or wait? As for the Ultrabay, is there any place besides eBay where I can find a good 3rd party caddy, or is the OEM caddy good enough (even with the gap caused by the 9.5mm height)? Will I actually notice the difference between SATAIII and II after using a SATAII SSD for a year (already seems relatively fast as is)?

EDIT: 85 views and no responses?

 

Depending how often you use your DVD drive I would swap it out if you need more space now, but I for one could not live without it.

Personally I'll wait for the prices to drop.

 

Did you try manually setting your pagefile down to a lower size? You have 12 GB RAM = 18 GB pagefile by default.

 

Do some OS tweaks to free up some space. Like Tsunade Hime said, reduce the page file. With 12GB you can probably get away with deleting it. Also disable the recycle bin. And disable OS backups and hibernating if you can live without them. All this should net you a HUGE chunk of free HD space.

 

When I installed the 320, I did exactly that. I have no page file, hibernation is disabled, System Restore and automatic backups are disabled. Still have The Recycling Bin, but I have a habit of deleting everything in there soon after it goes to the bin.

Price-wise, the 500gb HDD seems like the best option, but I'm worried that I'll be too rough with the laptop and crash the drive. Next most inexpensive would be the 330, though I don't know how long Intel takes on refunding MIRs and I'm a bit worried about the drive since Intel switched to Sandforce (why..?).

 

"too rough"? What, are you going mountain biking?

Mr. Mysterious

 

You can delete the recycle bin??? Awesome! I've just developed a habit of shift-deleting everything which makes it skip the recycle bin.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I727 using Tapatalk 2

 

Leaning towards getting the Intel 330 since it'll give me enough speed and I only have $220 to spend *max*.

Do you guys think that the SF-2281 controller via Intel is a good bet?

 

Samsung 830 256GB was $225 from buydig.com just recently, may still be. Free shipping. Expand your budget by $5.

 

$249 at the moment at buydig, and I only have $236 to spend on a ssd after buying the Ultrabay caddy (NewmodeUS) (also, dammit! $225...). Don't have much in checking atm and if I wait to transfer funds from another account, these sales will be gone (especially since it's a weekend and Memorial Day).

I need to read up on the SF-2281 in the 330 a bit more and shop around before making a final decision, but right this moment the 330 looks appealing (though I am slightly nervous of SandForce, even if they were bought out by a supposedly better company).

Exactly I also generally toss my laptop in with my binders and other stuff in my bookbag when going to/from class, usually while turned on (closed though, obviously lol). As a side bonus, now seems to be a great time to get my feet wet in SATAIII and see how good it really is over SATAII.

 

Trust the Intel warranty

Mr. Mysterious

 

Lol, ninja'd you.

Anyway, I've had great experiences with Intel so far (the W520 processor is the first Intel CPU I've owned and that works well, and the 320 has been a good friend to me even though I haven't flashed the firmware to correct the 8MB bug).

Would be awesome if 512GB SSDs were reasonably priced, but as another thread here points out, that won't be for a few years. Wish I had bought the 300GB version of the Intel 320 last year, but that was (and still is) cost prohibitive.

 

I mean they had the M4 512 GB for like ~640ish and PM830 right behind it around like 680-720. It's not that far-fetched considering a 64 GB SLC SSD in 2007 was 1000.

 

I would say get a 128/256GB Samsung 830 as your main drive & put the 320 into the ultrabay via a caddy. Put the OS & most commonly used apps on the 830, & games/videos/less common apps on the 320. I didn't want to put an HDD back into my computer so i opted for two SSDs.

I'm doing a similar thing now. I put my old 128GB 470 into the cd/dvd bay via a caddy (SATAII, perfect!) and my 830 as my main drive (SATAIII, awesome!). This way my OS/apps are separated from my games or less commonly used apps and I don't mind bringing an external USB HDD with me if I need access to all my data.

I don't know of any laptops that have a SATAIII connection at the cd/dvd bay. I also use 2x2.5" 500GB eSATA HDDs for redundancy backups. I can leave my backups at home because I don't need to carry all of my data with me 24/7. If I need to take a lot of files with me, then I can take them in my 1.8" 60GB HDD USB 2.0 enclosure and not bring top-secret sensitive files with me at all times.


My current SSD space...

Drive Letter / Used space, Free space
C:/ 45.2GB, 193GB
D:/ 73.9GB, 45.3GB

External HDDs...
E:/ 298GB, 167GB
G:/ 46.7GB, 9.15GB
H:/ 300GB, 165GB


Another thing you can do that I do every so often is to do some "spring cleaning" of your storage drives. I will go through all of my folders and files and delete old, unused, or otherwise useless data/files/apps/etc. in order to free up some capacity. If you're realistic with yourself about the things you have and whether you actually need/want them, many times you will find that we hoard digital content as much as we hoard real life things. Later we find out that we really didn't need to hold on to that "thing" and gained valuable space by getting rid of it.

-delete old/blurry/useless images, videos
-delete old/useless documents
-delete old/useless music (I stream music using Pandora/Radiosure or just youtube a song whenever I want to hear music)
-delete game files you are not going to play
-delete old program files you are not going to use
-uninstall programs that you don't really use, or create "portable versions" instead & put them on a USB stick
-Move music library, images & documents to an SDXC memory card
-leave the majority of your data at home, only bring with you what you really need

 

- invest in a network NAS with web interface or Windows Homer Server.

 

Back on topic Any guides to do this? I've always been interested in NAS.

Mr. Mysterious

 

Right now, I'm using 114.4GB of the total 148GB space provided on the 160GB SSD. This leaves me with ~37% free space, comfortably above the (at least) 10% threshold that I want to keep free on a SSD (if you fill a SSD past 90%, performance drops dramatically until you free up space). Counting the videos/movies, additional programs, additional games, and additional data that I currently store on my externals, and that 114.4GB bumps up to nearly 265GB. Assuming that a 128GB SSD will have a formatted capacity of 110GB, buying said SSD will leave me with only 258GB to work with within my laptop.

If I had caught the $225 830 256GB deal HTWingNut mentioned, that would have been the end of it. However, it has now increased in price and it would be more cost effective to buy a Crucial M4 256GB (but then again that's still outside my budget). I would definitely love to get an 830, but they are probably some of the most expensive consumer SSDs on the market in terms of $/GB, and 128GB isn't enough for what I want.

As for that list...

- Photos only take up a GB or two total, and the videos are mostly movies I like to watch.
- I mostly keep school documents and stuff like financial/legal (which I do need to keep)
- I have about 1700 songs in iTunes, the majority of which I listen to (Pandora is awesome and I love the music I am able to get, but a lot of my music is hard to find on there, like decent industrial metal or heavy dubstep like Chrispy)
- Don't really have that many game files (not too much into PC gaming these days)
- Most programs on my computer are either small and wouldn't make a big dent, or I actually use them and/or they do make a dent as well. MATLAB takes 4GB of disk space, for example, and that's just the version where I have to "phone home" to the campus servers to use it (I'm sure an actual, full install would take even more space).
- I could do that I imagine, though I've had bad experiences trying to get iTunes to behave with the .exe on one partition, and music on another.
- That is my current situation, and the whole point of me starting this thread is that I want to move everything onto my laptop.

I'm sure that HTWingNut could make a nicely detailed guide on home servers, considering his home setup

Tried doing an Ubuntu file server a few months ago, though Bellsouth isn't friendly to letting home users run servers to the open Internet :/

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I appreciate everyone's responses so far! Seeing as I missed the good Samsung/Crucial sales and the 330 was released very recently, it looks like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place haha. Will do some more reading on the different drives out there.

 

Seems like videos are the big thing eating up most of your space. You're going to have to sacrifice a few to the big bad external drive!

Mr. Mysterious

 

D'oh!

Piece of cake these days really. Many NAS devices are "web aware" and auto generate a web site you just have to run through the wizard. My WHS will send IP updates to MS since they let you set up a domain name through your home setup, so it will keep the IP address updated automatically.

In all honesty if you need less than 4TB of storage, there are plenty of 3-4 bay NAS setups that you can use in RAID 1 or RAID 5. 3 x 2TB drives will give you 4TB storage with redundancy should one drive fail. WHS just gives you flexibility of a server if you want/need it with a simple to set up and use interface.