- Joined
- Aug 11, 2002
- Location
- St. Louis, Mo. U.S.A.
Been seeing this mentioned alot where builds will have the OS on a Solid State Drive and then a SATA drive for storage. Pros? Cons?
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benefits of having OS on a SSD?
- Thread starter Chum
- Start date
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2014
Pros would be faster load/boot times. My pc starts in 10-12 seconds. Cost I guess would be a con but the are getting cheaper.
OP
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- Aug 11, 2002
- Location
- St. Louis, Mo. U.S.A.
- Thread Starter
- #4
the other question is about installing programs...wont the system use both drives?
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2014
It all depends on how you set it up. I set mine up so nothing gets installed on my OS drive. That way when I have to redo winders because of benching I don't lose all my programs
OP
- Joined
- Aug 11, 2002
- Location
- St. Louis, Mo. U.S.A.
- Thread Starter
- #6
Still when you install a program, Winders
still runs that program so it is essentially using both drives. Years ago I had issues with this because when un-installing remnants would be on both drives. This will be my first Windows 7 machine so maybe its better now...
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2014
Well as of now I haven't had any issues apart from a game or two that wouldn't work but all my other program work after a clean re install
- Joined
- May 29, 2005
Install commoly used programs onto the SSD or things that would have a longer load time. If you get a decent-sized SSD (256+) you can fit a few games on there, which makes it nice for those load times as well.
@ Chum regarding your other post, if you install onto another drive the files are loaded off of that drive into memory thus mostly just using the one secondary drive unless temp files are being written to the OS drive.
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2007
- Location
- Near Toronto Canada
Most SSDs are SATA drives themselves, with the exception of Msata And M.2 drives, and PCI express drives.
Basically, having the OS on an SSD makes the OS smoother and faster. Same goes for pretty much anything you load onto an SSD. It just reads and writes faster than an HDD. That's about all you need to know.
The pros are faster speeds and higher resistance to shock damage. The cons are the higher price and the fact that SSDs have a limited number of write cycles. However, this limit is so high that the average person would throw the SSD in the garbage for being antiquated before the drive would fail.
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2008
You'd better rethink that. Regardless of where you install the program it's presence will necessarily be recorded in the Windows registry and so will the program settings. If the Windows registry doesn't have information about the installed program then Windows doesn't know it's there. It's just like it's not even installed.
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2014
I've reinstalled twice and so far no issues with anything.
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2008
You must not have done a complete clean install then, where you remove the old partitions and create new ones on the system drive. Sure, what you describe will work if you just do a retread install where you retain the old system info but that kind of defeats the purpose since it may not get rid of the problems which prompted the reinstall in the first place. If you were to wipe the system drive or install a new hard disk I think you would find your method won't work insofar as retaining the old programs installed on the other drive.
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2014
I completely reformat every time and I have a second SSD. Just to be sure I'll do a clean install on that one and put it in just to double check. But I have had it set up this way since I built my computer.
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- Dec 27, 2008
I just don't see how you can wipe out the Windows registry with a clean install and have it find programs that are on another disk that involve registry entries. Registry has to do with registration and that is done when the program is initially installed.
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- Dec 1, 2007
- Location
- Near Toronto Canada
LOL that was good.
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- Jul 15, 2014
Well on other ssd now with complete clean install only thing that didn't work was battlefield 4. All other programs working like nothing happened
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- Dec 27, 2008
Well, hush my mouth! I might be wrong and all wet in my thinking. It wouldn't be the first time. The only thing I can figure is that somehow Winders finds and re-registers the installed programs. Do me a favor, would you? Search the registry for references to some of those programs on the other disk. It is also true that some programs install without having to interact with the registry. Some utilites we use seem to do that. They are sort of self-contained.
- Joined
- May 29, 2005
What programs are you using. Some programs write to registry and some do not. For example, Steam+its games are not needed to be reinstalled.
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2014
besides the usual benching programs that I have been using as of late all my games are steam games except for battlefield. So that is most likely why it didn't work.
I haven't read every reply, so this has probably been said a few times.. but I'll just throw in that I use my SSD for OS, Photoshop (and other photo progs), and the game I'm playing most - Battlefield 4.
Boot up is fast, actions in Photoshop are fast and game load times are fast.
All my other games and storage are on my various other SSDs and HDDs.
Most programs allow you to designate where you install them, but sometimes that's hidden in the "advanced options" area.
If your question is "will I notice?" or "is it worth it?".... the answer couldn't be a bigger "yes!"
