I am asking for help to answer this question, due to the fact that I am needing to know before I order the parts. Listed here are the SSD I am thinking of purchasing 'Crucial M4 128GB with Desktop Bracket' or 'Samsung 830 Desktop Kit', both are priced well and yet I seem to see more people getting the 'Crucial'. Even though the 'Samsung' is better from tech reviews.
Hopefully some of you can give me some directional feedback, thank you very much for your time to answer my question.
The only difference you'll see in gaming are decreased load times. You're not going to get anymore frames per second in-game just because you have it installed on an SSD.
Most people use the SSD as a boot drive because it significantly decreases boot and shut down times. With a 128GB SSD you should be able to install the OS, some programs, and some games on it though.
The difference between the Crucial and the Samsung is pretty negligible. From the reviews I've seen the Crucial performs slightly better, but it's nothing significant. I'd say buy whichever costs less. Don't forget to update the firmware when you get it too, because that will increase the performance even more.
Thanks, I seem to be a bit confused with how you update the firmware. Do you connect it upto the PC and then update firmeware, also when installing Win 7 again. Do I need to format the drive before putting Windows on it?
You probably do need to format it before you install windows, but windows will probably do that for you automatically during the installation anyway.
When it comes to the firmware, you can just download the firmware updater from the manufacturer's website, and it should guide you through the process from there. It's not hard at all. It will just download and install a file for you, and you can update it after you've already installed windows on it.
I had Skyrim on a 74000 rpm HDD and switched to an SSD recently. Yes, the load screens are much shorter but so is everything else. In SKyrim, you load five cells in the game world and as you walk around other cells are loaded and unloaded as your playing. Every time something new is loaded the HDD is accessed. That translates into an in-game loss of FPS. In games where everything is loaded all at once it isn't as noticeable but if you play a game like Skyrim where content is always being loaded, an SSD will be a big benefit.
I would use the SSD as a boot drive regardless. It will speed up your whole system. SSD performance won't be very noticeable in most games, and I've never encountered the phenomenon that zonzai is talking about, but I also have Skyrim installed on my two WD Caviar Black drives that are in RAID 0, and they're about as fast as a SATA 2 SSD anyway.
I have a 240GB Patriot Wildfire as my boot drive, and I also install all my programs and non-steam games on it.
However after looking at the options, I could run an 256GB SSD just for games. I don't install many of them, listed here:
World of Warcraft, Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, World of Tanks, Battlefield 3, Star Wars The Old Republic, Civilisation 5, Star Trek Online, Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3. In total I estimate they would take up around 158GB at current date.
So to recap a 128GB SSD for OS and Relevent Programs, HDD for Music and a 256GB for Games. Anyone think this isn't such a good idea?
I'm running a 256GB from Cruial and I'm very happy with it. I play games like Battlefield3 and I'm in taking flags while my clan m8's are looking at loading screens. I also play ArmA (Dayz) there is an edge to be found there too. Mind you ArmA it's all about the CPU and not much else...