About to instal a 128GB SSD. Any tips and pontential pitfalls?

[Cage]

OK, I'm tired of waiting for things to happen with my current system, particularly with my internet connection manager. And yes, I've pruned all the unnecessary crap from 'Start-up'.

I'm retired, but the fact that I have time on my hands doesn't seem to have alleviated my inherent impatience.

So, to speed thing up I've hit the 'BUY' button for a 128GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD.

My intention is to use it to run my OS (Windows 7 64bit), Photoshop and other PP programs, as well as the Bigpong Connection manager. I figure if I do the PP on the SSD and save the finished product to one of my spindle drives it should speed things up. Yes?

My pertinent system info is:

O/S - Windows 7 64bit Pro

CPU - AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition @3.2GHz, with unlocked multipliers, but capable of a steady 3.7GHZ if needed, with Noctua twin fan cooler.

RAM - 16GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 Ripjaws running at 1333 MHz, can be squeezed to 1600MHz if needed

GPU - Sapphire Radeon HD5670 with 1GB DDR3 RAM

HDD - 1 x WD 1TB (C)
2 x WD 500GB ........ There is a lot of duplication on these drives that I will clean up.

Any hard won tips, and things to avoid, would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[ameerat42]

Yes. WARNING! From all reports, be prepared for breakneck speeds.

[Cage]

Thanks am.

Just what I wanted to hear.

[Cage]

All done and dusted!

I'm very tired, but also quite satisfied.

It really went without a hitch, the most time being taken with Windows Updates.

[ricktas]

You should not be able to (Cause windows should know and set it accordingly), make sure drive defrag is turned OFF for an SSD. Enjoy your new faster access times.

Re using the SSD for the image files you are processing, SSD's are designed as WORM drives (write once read many), and they are better not being used to read/write constantly to/from, rather they last longer (yes they can fail like any other drive), if you write stuff to them once, and then just read from them. Which is why they are good for the OS and software etc, rather than being used as a 'working files' drive. I would store your images on the HDD. You will find just having PS on the SSD will make a lot of difference.

[Cage]

Cheers Rick and thanks for reminding me to disable defrag.

I'm not sure what you were referring to when you said I "should not be able to".

If it was about the updates, Windows wanted me to download all the pre SP1 fixes, but I would then be duplicating a lot of that when I installed SP1. There were a couple of recommended patches to instal prior to installing SP1 which I did, and I then downloaded the ISO and it all went smoothly.

If I did it again I would download the ISO from Digital River who offer a system specific ISO, instead of the 2GB version from MS which contained the ISO for x86, X64 and ia64 versions of the OS.

[ricktas]

no. Windows should recognise the SSD and disable defrag automatically, but sometimes it doesn't, so you have to check that it has not set a regular scheduled task to do it, and if it has, turn it off.

[Cage]

no. Windows should recognise the SSD and disable defrag automatically, but sometimes it doesn't, so you have to check that it has not set a regular scheduled task to do it, and if it has, turn it off.

Just checked and it was set to defrag at scheduled times.

Now turned off.

Thanks

[wideangle]

You should not be able to (Cause windows should know and set it accordingly), make sure drive defrag is turned OFF for an SSD. Enjoy your new faster access times.

Re using the SSD for the image files you are processing, SSD's are designed as WORM drives (write once read many), and they are better not being used to read/write constantly to/from, rather they last longer (yes they can fail like any other drive), if you write stuff to them once, and then just read from them. Which is why they are good for the OS and software etc, rather than being used as a 'working files' drive. I would store your images on the HDD. You will find just having PS on the SSD will make a lot of difference.

From what I have read SSD drives are a lot more reliable than what they were in the past. I read a review on the OCZ vector series claiming that they are good for 20GB read/write data per data per day and with a 5 year warranty. By that time you would likely be upgrading the drive anyway. The software you put on an SSD will be reading and writing to it (cache/catalouges etc) regardless. I would agree though, putting images on another drive is beneficial purely because of large image sizes in which you would run out of space on an SSD drive.