Segmented Storage

Hey NBR,

I'm not sure if my title is the proper way to describe it but I'm thinking of doing the following to my Clevo that I'm about to order.

- 30GB aftermarket mSata for W7
- 250GB Samsung Evo 840 main drive slot
- 700GB spin drive in the optical drive.

Would this set up cause any issues/ should I be aware of any downfalls or shortcomings of doing a set up this way?

Thanks in advance!

 

EVO? Just say no.

See:
Samsung 840 EVO read speed drops on old-written data in the drive

See:
Read speeds dropping dramatically on older files; benchmarks needed to confirm affected SSDs


240/250/256GB SSD's are a waste of time/effort and $$$ - get a 480/500/512GB SSD at minimum and don't forget to OP by 25 to 30% for optimum/sustained performance over time.


30GB mSATA? May as well install W7 to a 2000 era HDD... Even for such a 'secondary' O/S setup, I would recommend at least a 240/250/256GB mSATA (Crucial M4 if you can still find them or M500's are great here).


HDD in optical bay; No such thing as a 700GB HDD - I would recommend the HGST Travelstar 1TB HDD for storage duty.


No matter what you do, make sure that the main O/S drive (I would only recommend Win8.1x64 Pro Update 1) is the only drive physically installed when you're doing a clean install (again; only way I would recommend a new install to a new SSD) on your system.


Either upgrade your budget if you can now or keep saving. To do what you're outlining above is just a fail waiting around the corner to happen.

Don't let it; get SSD's worth paying for and set yourself up for success.


Good luck.

 

My install of Windows, I did on my Dell desktop last month and it is pretty light, is 40GB, so yes, 30GB is too small for Windows unless you're running a stripped version. 80GB is probably the minimum, but since no one is making 80GB SSDs any longer, I'd say 120GB is the minimum.

 

I wouldn't bother with such a crappy msata ssd. Also no reason to go with a 700GB hdd. Get something 1TB or more, and install your second OS on that drive.

40GB is in no way "pretty light" for a Windows 7 installation. With page file and hibernation disabled, 30GB SSD is way more than enough for a usable 2nd OS, without stripping anything.

 

With pagefile reduced to 1 GB and hibernation disabled, a Windows 7 Professional installation is less than 10 GB.

 

Lol OP 30GB SSD just for Windows 7... Good luck with that!

If you want to do it properly, I'd suggest keeping it to 2 drives... a 480/512GB mSATA SSD for OS+Stuff that needs to be loaded fast (programs, routinely played games) and a secondary 1TB 7200rpm drive (Hitachi 7K1000) for other less important things and games...

For the SSD, look at the Crucial ones which have been suggested... Stay away from 840 Evo... the 2.5" is a pile of junk and although the mSATA version seems to work alright, I'd stay away from it anyways since it also contains crappy TLC memory...

 

The size of a Windows install isn't the real issue here; the issue is that 30GB SSD's just fall flat on their face from a performance aspect vs. higher capacity models. I regularly install Win8.1x64 Pro with ~8GB used space - but I still use the biggest SSD I can with 30% OP'ing to give me at least 150GB O/S capacity with the remainder used/partitioned as the DATA D:\ drive.


See:
AnandTech | The Full Intel SSD 525 Review: 30GB, 60GB, 120GB, 180GB & 240GB Tested


Yeah; sucky ~50MB/s/100MB/s R/W performance (and this is 'fresh' - in a used state, hardly better than an SD card, imo).

Not to mention this particular model doesn't really support TRIM either (as all/most SF based SSD suffer from).

(With a 240GB drive tested; the SSD falls to ~20% of the clean performance numbers and after TRIM is still only ~52% of the out of box experience - imagine what a single nand package like the 30GB model will do? Less than circa 2000 HDD 4200RPM performance, overall - if SE'd after every heavy usage).

 

It seems I misspoke, I meant to say 30GB, but regardless, I don't think the average user is going to mess with the paging file or hibernation.

 

@OP, you're better off with a larger mSATA drive for the OS. Not only is 30 GB very cramped, especially once you have programs and everything installed on the SSD, but your install will eventually grow in size due to new programs being installed, updates to Windows, etc.

Also, assuming that you have something along the lines of 16 GB of RAM in there, Windows 7 will go somewhat crazy if you try tin install it on a 30 GB drive. I've seen Windows go nuts because we were trying to install it on a 64 GB SSD in a desktop sporting 64 GB of RAM. Let's just say that there were some conflicts with page file size, hibernation file size, RAM capacity and SSD capacity.

 

This. All of this.

 

I would do something like this myself

main drive 128-512gb SSD for OS and programs
msata 128gb-256gb for games/small downloads
spinner for backup/data/large downloads

If you don't have large programs and have to keep your whole steam library, ~240-256gb total SSD space should be fine. Though if you are in the US, there get at least 240gb per drive .