Multi Purpose PC - Your Opinions Please

The single SSD and a big HDD for storage is the best option.

Excellent choice, you'll be very happy with that setup.

It's a little late but I have to agree with some of the advice given, you can easily use a SSD half that size and saved a bit of cash.

Glad you got away from that dodgy RAID SSD, non-standard single SSD, line of sales crap they were trying to feed you, some people have no morals.

If they had a way to use Trim on a SSD RAID array, they could make a lot of money and everyone would know about it.
Definite sales pitch.

Dave76 said:

The single SSD and a big HDD for storage is the best option.

Excellent choice, you'll be very happy with that setup.

It's a little late but I have to agree with some of the advice given, you can easily use a SSD half that size and saved a bit of cash.

Glad you got away from that dodgy RAID SSD, non-standard single SSD, line of sales crap they were trying to feed you, some people have no morals.

If they had a way to use Trim on a SSD RAID array, they could make a lot of money and everyone would know about it.
Definite sales pitch.

Hi Dave76,
Thanks for the good words, enjoy it I intend to do.

Actually this SSD (256 GB) will work out very well. On my last sysem (XP) I had a RAID 0 setup made up of two 10,000 rpm WD150 Raptors, resulting in a 300 GB C drive.
I only kept the OS and all my many various programs on the C drive, almost no data at all. Yes, there was some data on the C drive, but not much.

After 3 years of adding various programs to my system, the used portion on the C drive grew to about 140 GB (so the disk was almost half full). Basically, this tells me that I really do need the 256 GB SSD, the next size down is 128 GB (or 120 GB) which wouldnt be big enough for me over the long haul.

The line of "sales crap" came from one bad sales technician without any morals (there are many sales techs at this company). When I called back to talk about my concerns I happend to get a very good and more knowledgeable sales tech who helped me straighten everything out and save me 22% to boot. Persistence is what finally paid off.

And a number of people have suggested that a single SSD is so fast I probably wouldnt have noticed any improvement in an SSD RAID ARRAY anyway !!!!!!
Dont really know ablout that ???

Hope they can get the TRIM operation working with RAID. Maybe someday we wont even need a TRIM operation !!!!!!!! :):):)

thehappyman said:

After 3 years of adding various programs to my system, the used portion on the C drive grew to about 140 GB (so the disk was almost half full). Basically, this tells me that I really do need the 256 GB SSD, the next size down is 128 GB (or 120 GB) which wouldnt be big enough for me over the long haul.

Yeah, but how much time did you actually spend ensuring that things got uninstalled that you weren't using? Most people just load and load and load and do very little actual maintenance. When you have a smaller drive, you actually find some ways to reduce your footprint without really giving up much. I'm on an 80GB Intel C drive at the present time and it's got nearly 45GB free with a few games and all of my apps.

pparks1 said:

thehappyman said:

After 3 years of adding various programs to my system, the used portion on the C drive grew to about 140 GB (so the disk was almost half full). Basically, this tells me that I really do need the 256 GB SSD, the next size down is 128 GB (or 120 GB) which wouldnt be big enough for me over the long haul.

Yeah, but how much time did you actually spend ensuring that things got uninstalled that you weren't using? Most people just load and load and load and do very little actual maintenance. When you have a smaller drive, you actually find some ways to reduce your footprint without really giving up much. I'm on an 80GB Intel C drive at the present time and it's got nearly 45GB free with a few games and all of my apps.

Hi pparks1,
I constantly paid attention to reducing my "footprint" and had lots of utilities for that purpose. No, I didnt use every program every day, but who does ????
I am glad you have been able to make do on an 80 GB Drive - but I know I couldnt.
Bedises the full Microsoft Office suite, I have Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe Imageready, Adobe Photoshop CS3, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, Acrobat Professional, Microsoft Visio Professional, Itunes, Ulead Photo Explorer Pro, Ulead Video Studio 10, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and perhaps several dozen other smaller programs. On top of that I have perhaps another dozen Utilities of various types for maintinence and benchmarking and even a few Games. Even my laptop's C drive has 75 GB of used space and thats with XP, a smaller OS than Win 7 Ultimate.

So clearly, my particular system could not live on an 80 GB SSD. Even 120 GB is too small. I dont want to fill up 80% of the Drive with stuff, I need room for more programs in the future. So I figure I'll initially fill up about half of the 256 GB SSD with plenty of room for the future. :):):)

Besides, I didnt spend that much more to get a 256 GB SSD - maybe a couple hundred $ at the most !!!!!

thehappyman said:

Bedises the full Microsoft Office suite, I have Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe Imageready, Adobe Photoshop CS3, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, Acrobat Professional, Microsoft Visio Professional, Itunes, Ulead Photo Explorer Pro, Ulead Video Studio 10,

Wow, that's a lot of commercial software. I simply cannot afford all of that stuff. In fact, I don't have any of those.

pparks1 said:

thehappyman said:

Bedises the full Microsoft Office suite, I have Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe Imageready, Adobe Photoshop CS3, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, Acrobat Professional, Microsoft Visio Professional, Itunes, Ulead Photo Explorer Pro, Ulead Video Studio 10,

Wow, that's a lot of commercial software. I simply cannot afford all of that stuff. In fact, I don't have any of those.

Hi pparks1
in adddition to my addiction to computers I am a digital photo and HD movie freak - I have about 50,000 large pics (and a bunch of HD movies) that Ive taken over the last 15 years. I love video editing. The computer is such a big part of my life, it rivals with my wife (ha ha). I like games but I dont play too many. Of course I dont even try to keep the photos or movies on the C drive. They take up a lot of room. And the music does too - I have several hundred albums in itunes and maybe another hundred podcasts and audiobooks.......

Cheers :):):)

Well, that explains your need for a big strong machine. I currently use 2 commercial pieces of software.....Microsoft Windows 7 is one of them and Acronis True Image 2010 is the other one. I just got a digital camcorder and am thinking of splurging on Sony Vegas Studio Platinum 10 Suite which is about $85. Everything else I use is free, or otherwise open source. And most of these things are tiny (firefox, notepad++, MSE, TrueCrypt, ImgBurn, filezilla, paint.net, etc).

pparks1 said:

Well, that explains your need for a big strong machine. I currently use 2 commercial pieces of software.....Microsoft Windows 7 is one of them and Acronis True Image 2010 is the other one. I just got a digital camcorder and am thinking of splurging on Sony Vegas Studio Platinum 10 Suite which is about $85. Everything else I use is free, or otherwise open source. And most of these things are tiny (firefox, notepad++, MSE, TrueCrypt, ImgBurn, filezilla, paint.net, etc).

Hey pparks1
I just love Acronis True Image 2010 - I used it for backing up and restoring the Raptor 10,000 rpm RAID 0 Drive on my, now deceased, Quad Core Desktop. I just odered True Image Home 2011 for my new Six Core Desktop (core I7 980X) which will be arriving in 3 weeks. The 2011 version is totally Win 7 compatible.

Digital Video is a blast - my DV camcorder is a Sony - so is my Laptop. Sony makes great stuff. And I just got a free copy of TrueCrypt (which I have to play with):):):)

Cheers

I heard Acronis changed the layout of 2011 and it's really hit or miss with people. I'm not having any issues with 2010...so I have no plans to upgrade at this point.

pparks1 said:

I heard Acronis changed the layout of 2011 and it's really hit or miss with people. I'm not having any issues with 2010...so I have no plans to upgrade at this point.

I hope they didnt mess it up !!!!!