Sager NP9150 on its way!

Hey, ordered my Sager last week and it should be in tuesday. I plan on taking out the 750GB Hard drive and putting in a 128 GB SSD that i'm buying from a friend. I plan on putting the 750 in an external enclosure and hook it up via eSATA. I'm going to use the external for movies, games, music, etc and use the 128 for just my OS, MS Office, and all my school stuff (word docs, ppts, etc). Does anyone have any experience with this as to whether it works alright?

 

It will work, but 128GB isn't much to have as your only internal drive. I would keep the 750GB inside your laptop and either :

1) add a 128GB mSata SSD
2) add a standard 128GB SSD as the primary and add the 750GB into the optical bay

It really depends on how much you use your CD/DVD/BR drive. I personally am not ready to run without an optical drive so I went for option 1

 

Yes, that was what i would like to do, but unfortunately mSATA is ridiculously expensive, even compared to other SSD's. My primary, like i said, it basically just to use for my OS and school stuff, i figure i'll leave a 50 GB partition for the Win 7, MS Office, and security software and use the rest for school. I have a friend who has an unused 128 GB SSD he's willing to sell for $80, which is really the only reason i'm bothering with any of it. Plus, an SSD should improve battery life a little as well. Worst comes to worst and it doesnt work i could always take a day and clone my hard drive on the external 750 GB and then just put it back in i guess.. haha

And I will be using it as a dvd player/writer so i'm not willing to give up on my DVD drive either

 

Would a 64 GB SSD be enough to fit my OS, office, etc?

 

Yes it will.

 

Thanks HTWingNut, you wrote an excellent review that sold me on the NP9150 btw haha and I found a 64 GB Crucial M4 on Tiger for like $75 so i'll probably get that. Thanks for the info! Btw, HT, about how much battery life will i get while just surfing the web/typing if i have the screen on minimum brightness, keyboard lights off, etc?

 

I'm going to tag along on this question. I use Steam for almost every game I buy, and I'd love for some single-player games to be on the SSD while multiplayer games/games I don't frequent as often on my HDD. Is there any easy way to install certain games to the SSD and other games to the HDD?

 

Honestly you'd probably (not 100% sure) be fine just leaving all games on your HDD, you really don't need SSD to increase game performance. That being said, if you have a lot of SSD space then why not, i basically just want to use the SSD as my boot device.

 

Install games on the SSD will help with game start time and map load times but wont make the game perform faster as thats based primarily on the GPU. When you install games on the computer you can tell it which drive to install to, not sure if you can do that with Steam games though.

 

I know the performance gain is only present in loads, but for games like Skyrim, I'd love to be able to have that go on the SSD as you have a lot to load.

 

There definitely are times its nice to have the faster speeds. Games that take up less space like Skyrim (~6GB) are no problem to install on the SSD but bigger ones like WoW (~25GB) thats taking up alot of SSD space.

 

yeah. I noticed too, when loading up my 256GB SSD with games/benchmarks for reviewing I had slight performance issues and realized I had like 5% free space on my SSD. Max Payne is 30GB, how horrendous.

 

You can use stuff like that to move Steam games back and forth between your SSD and HDD:

SteamTool Library Manager 1.1 - Stefan Jones

Steam Mover - traynier.com

And regarding the speeds of SSDs vs HDDs, I saw a post from someone a month or two ago that stated that his HDD took 52 seconds to load an area in Star Wars: The Old Republic, but his M4 took around 9 seconds. That really impressed me. The only thing I'll be missing, though, is that I'll probably won't have enough time to read what's written in Skyrim's loading screens or move the 3D models around

A shame, really, I just subscribed for a mod that adds more lore in the loading screens. Oh, well...

 

Steam allows you to specify an install directory for "all its games" but you can't install steam games in different drives I.e. specify install paths on a"per game" level.

Hope that clear that up.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

True, but read my post right above yours - there are workarounds for Steam's silly design decisions.

 

I read it, good info it was.

My posts intent and scope was how steam handles things.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

yeah thats the only thing about steam that i don't like, they also severely limit the mods that you can use with games like skyrim, they're are mods out there you can use with it, but steam has to have specifically allowed them, its silly.

 

Good plan.

Please make sure you change the hard drive carefully. If you damage the unit, your warranty will be voided.

 

Decided to get a 64 GB mSATA drive for my Primary!