SSD for m17x

I'm thinking about getting a SSD hard drive for my new m17x, but I can only afford one My normal setup is to have 2 separate hard drives, one as the primary which holds the OS and business type programs (Excel, Photoshop, etc), and another hard drive containing only games.

Should I use the SSD as the primary drive, holding the OS, or should I make the SSD the hard drive for games? I want to maximize gaming performance, as this is the primary use of this laptop, but I'm not sure if having faster read/write in the OS or for the gaming files themselves would be more helpful.

 

First of all, you should know that the hard disk would actually have very little effect on real world gaming performance (GPU matters the most, then comes CPU and system RAM) , especially considering how much your going to spend on an SSD! You can use the SSD for your primary partition with the OS.

 

I'm wondering a similar thing:
It seems you can only buy SSDs in RAID 0, making for 128GB storage. What I'm considering is 1x64GB SSD for the OS + files and another 250 or 500GB drive for mass storage, but this doesn't seem to be an option. I'm guessing there's no way to do this?

 

Maybe you can buy a laptop with one drive and buy the second drive yourself... whichever way it's cheaper.

 

^yeah,i agree!

 

The only problem is that replacing laptop parts is usually risky, it is perfectly possible to brick the laptop in doing so (Dell succeeded in going through 3 motherboards when fixing my laptop, luckily it is under 3-year warranty.

 

Stop being so paranoid, dude! It's perfectly fine and easy... it's just a hard disk... hard disks and RAM are the easiest things to upgrade... it's not a CPU, let alone a GPU!

 

If you`re getting the SSD, put the OS on it. You will get faster boot times and will get a fast and reponsive OS in general.

 

£2000 is a lot of money, bad experiences tend to stick. Would Alienware support it if something went wrong?

 

If you were looking at an Alienware (owned by Dell), I would have discussed getting the new SATA II Samsung (reviewed below) as a primary drive and then choose your HD as secondary. This would be a great choice and also very affordable with the system purchase.

It may not have been an advertised optiion but they are in the system if you request specifically....at least they are with Dell and...Alienware is a Dell product.

With respect to gaming, I am hearing a totally different version of ssd performance from those who have it within their gaming system. Yes it loads much faster initially, but also, when required to access data while playing, it is apparently a huge speed increase. There is a thread on this on the site somewhere. I am not a gamer so I cannot give you first hand knowledge.

This is something the site might want to tackle.