What to do with my 64Gb Crucial M4???

[CasualNinja]

All my components should be arriving today and i have a bit of a dilemma about what to do with storage. I will be getting a 1Tb Samsung Spinpoint, a 64Gb Crucial M4 and the Gigabyte Z68 mobo.

What should i do with those components? It seems my options are:

1) Use the SSD as a boot drive for OS/programs/games.

2) Use the entire 64Gb for the Intel Smart response.

3) Use part of the drive for Smart Response (suggest a reasonable size?) and the rest for the OS (not even sure if this is possible)

Thanks!

 

[groberts101]

Unless you really need tons of apps or games installed on the OS volume?.. I would always use SSD as it was intended to be used as the boot device.

Hybrid drive setups are always going to cause some type of compromise and you just need to have foresight to how much you are willing to accept.

Personally, I'd take a strictly SSD run OS with a HDD raided storage volume over a hybrid setup any day as writing to storage will always be much faster. Have to remember that you will perceive wait times for writes FAR more than waiting for a read to occur.

 

[LordConrad]

Given the choice, I would definitely use the SSD as a stand-alone boot drive. A caching setup is the next best option, but takes a back seat compared to an SSD boot drive. Option 1 is best, and should be no extra trouble since you're already doing a fresh install.

 

[r3xx3r]

use the SSD as the boot drive and install any programs that dont need the extra speed (example: office, internet browsers) in a Program Files folder on the 1TB samsung drive (it is what i do, and it works great that way)

 

[CasualNinja]

Thanks guys, i think i'll go with option 1. However one question:

Is it possible to install the OS onto the SSD and then set up the rest of the SSD space for SMART response?

 

[geofelt]

I agree, option 1.

I think there is a limit on how much you can use for hard drive cache, 20gb, perhaps, but it is possible to do such a partition.

64gb is still small for an OS drive with some apps, and I think you should use all of it for drive C.

You can later get one of the Intel specific 20gb slc drives for hard drive assist.

 

[jwthomas1966]

I have the C-300 64GB SSD in my computer and after the OS and office was loaded onto the SSD and a couple of apps, I am down to a third of the drive left. Not going to be a lot left to do much anything else

 

[LordConrad]

Forget the caching, use it all for a boot drive.

 

[CasualNinja]

Best answer selected by casualninja.