Upgraded/rebuilt desktop but now what hard drive/SSD ?

[Bothwell_buyer]

Hi. With help from this forum I sorted regular blue screens - overclocking - voltage mis-match.
Anyway, .. I have
Giga Byte P67A-UD5 socket 1155 motherboard bought end january2011 and fitted with intel i7 2600 sandybridge now overclocked at about 4.2 (down from the 4.9)
2 Radeon XFX HD5770 graphics cards with link
8mb RAM
Corsair 70 liquid cooler
G7 Power Extreme 780W power unit
Windows 7 x64
Viewsonic widescreen screen (24" ?)
DVD RW
2 hard discs Seagate Barracuda 7200 both 750GB and both about 3 years old.

The hard discs are about the only things left untouched, altho I changed from Windows XP Pro to Windows 7 x 64.. losing 6 months worth of Outlook emails as the back ups failed - another story.

I am looking to send the boot up hard disc away to see if the emails can be recovered - they were backed up onto a WD 1TB Book in FAT file but that backup using Smart Email backup failed due to the size of the files. Otherwise its been ok for document backups.

Sorry about all the verbal!

Anyway, what I'm thinking is to keep 1 hard drive in the tower as backup along with the external disc drive; and send the main hard disc away to see if my emails can be recovered. As both hard discs are 3 years old and I use the machine a lot for research with multiple browser tabs open at any one time, I'm looking at fitting a new main hard drive - so what do I go for??

The boot up just now is slowish. Should I use a large SDD for the OS? I use Microsoft Office mainly and get 300+ emails a day as I help run 3 charities. Or should I stick with more conventional hard drives?
I intend keeping the main hard drive and perhaps use it in a back up machine. As you know, the motherboard has some issues re the sockets so I'm kind of limited to the 2 6(gb?) sockets for the drive connections.

Budget ? Willing to spend up to maybe £400 or so as the hassle of not having a robust main machine causes me big probs if things go wrong.

I've only had the machine up running for 4 weeks since the upgrade so can easily back up files and reload onto a new boot disc from the CD?DVDs


Reason for the upgrade was that the old MSI motherboard and quad core and the graphics cards were overheating a bit and getting noisy.


cheers for any ideas/suggestions

Ian frae Scotland

 

[Volumetrik]

It sounds like a SSD would increase the performance of your pc by alot. I would suggest a 60gb SSD. Mushkin makes very reliable ones : Mushkin Enhanced Callisto Deluxe 60GB

As for the e-mails, you should store them on your 750gb HDD.

EDIT: I just realized that your are using a B2 board ? Then you should get a SATA III SSD like this one : Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB

Or, wait for the B3 boards.
Using SATA II on the B2 motherboards can damage (as I read) the HDD's, so I would not risk it.

 

[Bothwell_buyer]

Thanks Volumetrik
Ye - I'll save the emails on the 2nd 750Gb hard disc - lesson learnt lol !!

I wondered about the Crucial C300 - what if I go for a larger 128gb or 256? Apart from price, is it worth it to keep me going for the next 2-3 years?
The 2 6GB sata sockets are ok from what I have read, but I need to get the motherboard changed as soon as poss to allow me to use the 3GB sata sockets safely.

At the moment I have the 2 hard discs plugged into the 6GB sata but it will make things more flexible if I can plug at least one of them into the 3GB...which means changing out the MB.... which I guess will be OK whenever Gigabyte get the replacement available.

 

[Volumetrik]

You really don't need more than 80GB for a OS SSD unless you install all your apps on the OS drive, then yes 128 GB is good.
As for the longevity of the SSD, they usually last about 1~1.5 years depending on utilization. Your call.

 

[Bothwell_buyer]

thank you for the advice. The 128 is the one I'll go for - cheaper than the 256 too !!