Some questions about SSDs

Hi finished I ordering a laptop with a Hard drive caddy, and plan to switch out the internal drive with a SSD

its my first time using an SSD, and would like some advice on a couple of things

1. Size. is 64gb big enough if i have a secondary storage of 750GB HDD? i.e. put in just the os and crucial stuff. Its mostly gonna be for gaming. Do I have to install the games on the SSD as well? would doing so provide significant boosts?

2. Brand & Pricing. Whats the best brand? thinking of buying from Newegg. How much could I typically find a 64gig one for? how about 128gig ones? should i wait for black friday?

 

64gigs is enough, I use a 40gig in my notebook, but I had a 64gig in my desktop. It's tight though. Win7 is quite large. Put a good size game on the 64 and you are at the 50-60% mark very quickly. The 40gig is almost half by the time I get Win7 and my normal stuff installed, without any games, but that is fine for me on that. I changed to a 128gig on the desktop and it's much nicer to work with.

Brands... Intel is good, Crucial is good, OCZ seems to depend on the model. I use Intel in the notebook and Crucial on the desktop. Samsung is rated well it seems, but I have no experience with them.

 

Comparison:
SSD vs HDD World of Warcraft load times - YouTube

As for size... it really depends how many games you want to put on there

 

Install steam on you mechanical hard drive and then use an NTFS junction point so you can put games which you play a lot on the SSD. If you install on the SSD and then use junction points to put games on the mechanical hard drive then you'll end up moving a lot more around and wasting a lot more time in general.

If you can't be bothered with junction points then just install steam on the mechanical and leave it like that. If you have retail games then they can be installed independantly of steam so you can put those wherever you like.

 

thanks for the replies. I have some more questions

1. do you have to leave some space on the SSD to get better speed? like with HDDs? or is that not an issue for SSDs

2. I saw some SSDs come with 'transfer kits'. Is this relevant for me? I'm gonna be reinstalling the OS and using the SSD as the primary drive. Its a brand new laptop so I wouldnt have any other data on it.

3. SATA II vs SATA III. My laptop supports both but SATA II drives seem to be around 20% cheaper. but about half as fast? Are SATA II drives still fast enough for most use or is it better to pay extra 20% for SATA III

 

Some SSDs already have overprovision, but otherwise some people like to keep something like 20% free space.

Shouldn't matter for you then. Transfer kit should come in handy if you want to clone your original drive.

Which SSD drive models are you looking at?

 

looking at these 4 atm. only the m4 is SATA III

Newegg.ca - Crucial M4 CT064M4SSD2 2.5" 64GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
Newegg.ca - ADATA S596 Turbo AS596TB-64GM-C 2.5" 64GB USB 2.0 & SATAII Internal / External Solid State Drive (SSD)
Newegg.ca - Intel 320 Series SSDSA2BW080G301 2.5" 80GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - Internal SSD
Newegg.ca - SanDisk Ultra SDSSDH-120G-G25 2.5" 120GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

 

If you end up going with SATA II, I recommend getting the Samsung 470 128gb or the Samsung 470 64gb, both of which will provide great drive results. Furthermore, if you want SATA III, I recommend Samsung 830 64gb.

That should give you a heads up, I noticed Newegg in Canada didn't have the Samsung models listed at all, so I went on to eBay Canada to check for you, but they weren't there either. Some of those people will ship internationally but you'll have to pay for the shipping separately. The prices in CAD money is ridiculous when I checked their eBay.

 

Tigerdirect canada is selling the samsung 830 64gb for 155$ which is very ridiculous, so I would not recommend that. I guess the best choice is to wait until Black Friday to see how the prices go.