Show us your hard drive performance

It's a matter of working style - the ease of use - a balance of performance and storage usage. Currently, my C: drive has about 200 GB used, and my H: drive has about 1.2TB used - mostly video and photos.

I do appreciate what you are doing. I do get it. However, I'm more interested in convenience than you are. When I'm editing HD video, an SSD would not give me that much. The real work is rendering, which is CPU intensive. My electromechanical spinners never break a sweat. My biggest problem is keeping the chips cool.

The business with the Z68 chip-set and the SSD cache is an Intel thing to bridge the gap between HDD and SSD by providing a good sized most-used cache for the HDD in hardware. It does cut boot up time in half and the often used applications jump to life very quickly, just like it would with a full SSD, but with a 2TB capacity, in my case. Since this is a dedicated HTPC, it works out pretty well for way less money than full SSD.

It won't be long for SSDs to be the normal type of mass storage, with electromechanical HDD just something you could tell your grandchildren about. Then we'll be debating the virtues of biological computers verses photon based machines.

Bye.

whs said:

Crunchy Doodle said:

When a 500GB SSD of good performance sells for $250, I will give it serious consideration. I've put small SSDs in my laptop and notebook with good results. I have a HTPC with a Z68 chip-set that supports using a small SSD as a smart cache for the HDD, which gives a bit of a boost, and SSDs are still too expensive for my desktop machine in my opinion. I say that as someone who once had their employer pay $1500 for a full-size 5.25" 80 MB HDD. That's MB, not GB. Yes, I'm that old.

Bye.

whs said:

Not bad for spinners. Nice for the data (if you move big chunks). But for the OS, I would go with an SSD. The access time on a spinner is just too slow.

I don't know what you are trying to do. On desktops, a 60GB SSD is ample for the OS.

None of my SSDs have more than 30GBs used for the OS. But, of course, I moved the user data to the HDDs. But on the SSDs I have the total system (less the hiberfile) all programs (and I have about 50 extra programs - but no games) and the pagefile I reduce to 2GBs.

Using an SSD as a HDD cache seems to be a waste for me.

On my laptops I use 80 and 90GB SSDs plus a big 32GB stick for the overflow data. Works fine too.

Just fitted this new Hitachi 320 (7200 7mm) in my old (but still going strong) hp 6735b laptop. Am happy with the results, and it's a quiet drive with zero vibrations.

My Seagate Barracuda

whs, I hope not (I mean no break)!
I'm still planning to put an ssd (sams 830, 512 GB) and remove the hdd but I need to know if I'm capable to do the job myself! I would like to migrate all my software, including the OS from my hdd to the ssd! Is that possible? I've Norton Ghost but I don't know if is it possible! It would be very complicated to me to install all (I've lots of astronomy ans imaging sw installed) from scratch!

paulo