How to arrange new SSD and regular HDD

[sleepnever]

Hello-


I have a new (to me) PC that was built by a friend that has 2x 128GB SSD drives in it. My old computer's drives were 500GB SATA II's, one for my OS/apps/photos and a second for purely photo backup. I'm running Win7.


My question is how should I setup my drives? My thoughts were to install Win7 on the first SSD and all my other apps like Lightroom and such on the second. Then use the mechanical SATA drives to put all my photos and such to work off of.


I'm open to suggestions. Thanks!

 

[RC]

Are SSDs really fast enough to run an OS or even apps efficiently? I haven't read up on SSDs so I really don't know where they stand today. But if you were running an OS on a SATA II before, I can't imagine SSDs are even in then same ball park. However I may be wrong. Assuming I'm not, run your OS and apps (including LR) on the SATA and use your SSDs for data for backup storage. I build PCs every few years but haven't yet used a SSD.

 

[sleepnever]

Um, guess its been awhile since you built a PC. SSDs are the fastest consumer hard drive solution out there. Win7 boots in about 8 seconds or less. =)

 

[Halfrack]

Go SSD and never look back.... SSD is 20-100x faster due to the no moving parts - the number of disk read and writes per second is amazing.

Do:
SSD1 - OS and apps (well, as well as possible - 128gb isn't a whole lot)
SSD2 - Working set of photos - anything you're processing and where you import photos to
SATA1 - Backup - backup everything here (automated)
SATA2 - photo archive (once processed, it goes here)
External - photo archive backup (manual process)

 

[Tabercil]

I pretty much echo Halfrack's post. The only thing I'd do differently is make sure things like the OS temp cache and other bits that do a lot of reads & writes to the drive point to either SSD2, or to SATA1.

 

[RC]

Um, guess its been awhile since you built a PC. SSDs are the fastest consumer hard drive solution out there. Win7 boots in about 8 seconds or less. =)

Glad to be wrong, looking forward to using SSDs in the future. Thanks for the clarification.

 

[crasher8]

Are SSDs really fast enough to run an OS or even apps efficiently? I haven't read up on SSDs so I really don't know where they stand today. But if you were running an OS on a SATA II before, I can't imagine SSDs are even in then same ball park. However I may be wrong. Assuming I'm not, run your OS and apps (including LR) on the SATA and use your SSDs for data for backup storage. I build PCs every few years but haven't yet used a SSD.

MacBook Air?

 

[RC]

Are SSDs really fast enough to run an OS or even apps efficiently? I haven't read up on SSDs so I really don't know where they stand today. But if you were running an OS on a SATA II before, I can't imagine SSDs are even in then same ball park. However I may be wrong. Assuming I'm not, run your OS and apps (including LR) on the SATA and use your SSDs for data for backup storage. I build PCs every few years but haven't yet used a SSD.

MacBook Air?

Not a Mac guy or laptop user for that matter aside from my company laptop which I can't touch

 

[sleepnever]

Thanks for the replies guys, that'll get me started =)

 

[crasher8]

My Macbook Air comment was meant to say, SSD's have been driving OS's for quite some time. Not meant to sell you an Apple product.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I put my os and programs on a ssd and my documents, photos, etc on a 3TB drive. SSD's are much faster than mechanical drives. I also put my lightroom database on the SSD, that speeds up things as well. I'm thinking of adding a small m-sata ssd cache as well to my Dell XPS-8500. SSD's have really dropped in price, so a reasonably large 256GB drive is available at a reasonable price. Samsung seems to have the market cornered right now with high quality, high speed, high reliability, and low prices.

 

[RustyTheGeek]

As an IT guy, I see stuff here that is right and well thought out and stuff that's wrong. Most of that has been sorted out by now so I'll try to comment appropriately...

OS Setup - I could get into partition alignments for SSDs, etc but suffice to say SSD is the only way to go for the OS and apps. Turn off the pagefile because all it does is wear out the SSD and isn't necessary. Ditto big time for Defrag. DO NOT USE DEFRAG with an SSD! Windows Vista, 7 and 8 are SSD aware if you install from scratch and will automatically align themselves during install if you set up the partition and format during install. They will also disable the Pagefile and Defrag automatically if installed on the SSD. Try to make sure the BIOS is set for AHCI or RAID in order to get the most benefit with data transfers. SATA III is also best for the SSD drive. Some systems only have one bank of SATA III.

SSD - Fastest solution available, getting more affordable but read up on latest tech because it has also changed a lot in the last year. Hard to go wrong with the latest Intel, Samsung, Sandisk, OCZ Vertex or Crucial M series. Corsair isn't bad either but I haven't kept up with them lately. If you want to be lazy, buy from NewEgg and read the reviews first.

Where it put OS? SSD. Where to put Lightroom/Photoshop? SSD. Where to put catalog? SSD. Where to put photos? SSD but likely you will run out of space so this depends on convenience vs performance. In general, you won't lose a ton of performance if you put the photos on the spinning platter drives. This way you don't have to spend a lot of time moving pictures around in the catalog when you move them from the SSD to the larger volume for space reasons.

RAM - you can't have enough. I use SSDs and I still noticed a huge increase in Lightroom 4 performance when I went from 16G RAM to 32G RAM. Lightroom 4 is a dog. i7 system with SSD, RAID and 32G of RAM and it still runs 30 to 50 percent slower than LR 3.x. Grrr.

RAID and BACKUP - You can sink a lot of money into the computer fast. These digital pictures we take with abandon require a lot of storage space. Since they are important, they require redundancy and backup. I have a 120G AHCI SSD for the OS/Apps and three 2TB RAID 1 (mirror) volumes. A RAID is NOT a backup. It is drive redundant fault tolerance. You still need Backup and preferably a rotating external backup plan so you can keep one drive at a time offsite. I have an internal 2TB drive for backup and then I use 5 external 2TB USB3 drives for backup and rotate them weekly. And that's still not big enough for everything, it just covers the past year or two's data, (one 2TB current work volume). The rest is archive and doesn't change much.

I could go on but at least make sure you are doing multiple backups even if it's only to an internal hard drive. I do MWF, TTS, Sun Weekly and Sun Monthly to the internal and external then I rotate external drives once a week. This gives me plenty of backups to go back to if necc and the internal drive is used so if an external fails or gets disconnected, the backup still happens.

 

[RustyTheGeek]

I put my os and programs on a ssd and my documents, photos, etc on a 3TB drive. SSD's are much faster than mechanical drives. I also put my lightroom database on the SSD, that speeds up things as well. I'm thinking of adding a small m-sata ssd cache as well to my Dell XPS-8500. SSD's have really dropped in price, so a reasonably large 256GB drive is available at a reasonable price. Samsung seems to have the market cornered right now with high quality, high speed, high reliability, and low prices.

Another thing that is interesting that a friend and I were recently discussing is the performance increase that was obtained by running a smaller partition on a larger SSD (like a 256G SSD). Something like a 200G partition that left 30% or so unused. This gave the SSD a lot more "garbage" room for the drive controller to use which really sped up the performance. I can't find the article recently that discussed this but it makes sense because all SSDs do this anyway without your knowledge. They just don't allocate nearly that much workspace for garbage collection.

BTW, Samsung is indeed a great SSD but most of the major players are VERY close in performance and it will be hard to tell the difference in real world use. Stay with a major player SSD and shoot for best price.

There are a ton of performance "shootouts" around. Anandtech is a great place to read and learn. Here is one comparison they recently did which featured some strong players. Notice how close in performance they all are.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6328/samsung-ssd-840-pro-256gb-review/2

 

[RustyTheGeek]

Here is a good deal on the Samsung 840 Series SSDs. On Cost per GB, the 250G is the best deal. Amazing how the larger SSDs have drastically dropped in price in the last 6 months or so. Wow. Look and decide quickly, these eCost deals go fast. Merry Christmas!

120G - $90 (.75/GB)
http://www.ecost.com/p/Samsung-Removable-Hard-Drives/product~dpno~9411600~pdp.iaciccj?source=EWB24350

250G - $160 (.64/GB)
http://www.ecost.com/p/Samsung-Removable-Hard-Drives/product~dpno~9411538~pdp.iacibgh?source=EWB24350

500G - $342 (.68/GB)
http://www.ecost.com/p/Samsung-Removable-Hard-Drives/product~dpno~9427890~pdp.iaeefcb?source=EWB24350