MSATA, SSD, and a hard drive overkill?

mfauver22601

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Apr 11, 2012
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So If I have an mSata ssd for my OS, and use the SSD to help store games and help bridge my hard drive to make read times a little faster and then have a hard drive for everything else is this overkill or even needed? Is there any benefit to this?
 

jgutz2006

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Jul 7, 2009
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what do you mean by bridge your hard drive?

It is very common for people to use an SSD for their Operating system and some highly used applications/games depending on the size as this will shorten your windows startup times as well as how quickly an application will load or how quickly your game level will load up completely. Then use the large hard drive to store downloaded files, music, videos and even applications. If your SSD is 60gb or less, you will need to be cautious of what your putting on it as it can fill up quickly. Also it will show space as "in use" for the hiberfile.sys (hibernation) so if you have 4GB of RAM, the drive will reserve that amount for hibernation. Since this is a SSD, you do not need hibernation so disable this. There are many tips/tricks/tweaks for SSDs so google that if you do this setup.
 

Ben Cockburn

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Mar 28, 2013
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SSDs are great - they're fast, low power and cool running. The biggest improvement I've ever made to a PC came from swapping in an SSD for a regular HDD. However, after less than a year of use, the SSD failed following a power cut while the PC was running, and I lost all the data on there. When I rang up data specialists to ask about recovering it I was told that because the way the controller chip is involved in storing information about what was on the memory chips, there was no way to recover data from the SSD. If a regular HDD fails then you have a lot more options as the drive platters will still contain everything that is needed to recover the information. Since then I mirror my SSD (128GB) onto a partition of an HDD (2GB) so at the least I can recover everything stored there, and also store all the files I don't need ultra-high-speed access to - videos, pictures, old documents, etc, knowing that if the HDD fails there are many more options for recovering the data.