Best SSD/HDD Configuration as a Second Drive?

courtneybostdorff · Oct 21, 2018

Hi!

I have a Lenovo W530 Thinkpad 32GB RAM. It came with a 16GB mSATA and a 500GB HDD. I recently swapped out the HHD for a 2TB Crucial SSD. It's blazing fast now which is great. I have ordered a Newmodeus 2nd HDD / SSD Caddy because I wanted to utilize the 500GB HDD as well.

My question is this:

What is the best way to set up this computer? There will be a lot of read and write going on because I use the laptop to render really large images (10+GB). I would typically think that I should leave the read and write to the HDD so as not to wear out the SSD, however, with 2TB of space on the SSD, it seems like that would be a lot of wasted space to only run the OS on it. I want the laptop to be as fast as possible while utilizing both drives but I also want to ensure the longevity as well.

Does anyone have a good solution for this? Any and all assistance is greatly appreciated

Thanks!

karenjoly · Oct 21, 2018

I would not even consider wear and tear on SS or HDDs. Most modern drives are beasts over the long term. They may fail at first (Toshiba and chinese drives come to mind here) but seldom later on just from wear. All drives fail eventually but generally not soon enough to worry about.

What is crucial ( no pun intended) is a strategy for regular back ups of important things. Having competent back up is a far more important step than wondering how long before a drive meets the end of its warranty conditions. And the end of warranty does mean the drive then goes face down.

On configuration I would put windows on the SSD , hook up the HDD as storage, etc,. and since you have the caddy already, store the back ups on the minnow drive.

USAFRet · Oct 21, 2018

Don't fret over "wear and tear" on the SSD. In normal use, it will last many years.

courtneybostdorff · Oct 21, 2018

karenjoly :

USAFRet :

Hi all and thanks for the information! I can only agree to the "competent backups". There's nothing more gut retching than to have a drive go out and lose all your data. Since you've both said that wear and tear aren't a real immediate issue then I will just pop the other HDD into the caddy and I should be good to go.

Do either of you recommend any other sort of SSD/HDD setup for performance? Such as setting paging or anything else that I don't know about......which is most of it?

Thanks again to both of you for taking the time to assist!

USAFRet · Oct 21, 2018

Leave the page file on the SSD, system managed.
Maybe turn hibernation OFF.

For a backup strategy, read here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html

What do you use this system for (besides image rendering)?

courtneybostdorff · Oct 21, 2018

USAFRet :

Thanks for the info! I am using the system for image rendering. The images are all in RAW format and there are up to 120 images all rendering into "one". The most RAM I've seen the system use is about 22GB at one time.

Your home strategy is way way beyond me but I'd like to start putting something together because all your data loss points are completely valid. It would be nice to allow everyone in the house access to all video and audio files via their mobile devices.

I'll start researching to see where I need to begin to get that going

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