Solid State Hard Drive

[naut]

I have two 128GB in raid. It is pretty swish. After Win7 install I had 220GBish free space, so plenty to play around with. My only complaints would be that stability is a little less than 100%. Occasionally upon restart Win7 fails to load certain things (like AMD's CCC) or hangs in loading. Although, this is probably my fault as I run a very stripped Win7 with most unnecessary services disabled (gotta get the most performance possible!) not directly the SSDs or raid.

The other issue I had was with virtual memory. Obviously you do not want virtual memory using the SSD as it will kill the life expectancy of the drive massively. Win7 gets a little pissy if the virtual memory is reallocated to a volume other than the "C:" drive. You might have to check that Win7 has applied and maintains this change.

Here's a serious question: Let's say I get a smallish SSD because that's what I can afford. Now, most of my work on the PC is in MS Office, with the occasional excursion into DreamWeaver and GIMP2. In other words, my everyday work is not hard on the computer.

The place where I tax my computer is, of course, games.

So which would give me a more sexually satisfying experience:

1. Install Steamapps on the ssd?
2. Or boot from the SSD?

Let's assume for the sake of argument that I can't do both comfortably.

Personally I have Steam on the SSDs and use "mklink /J" to link the actual folders to my main hard drive. I like this set up because Steam is notorious for not liking being installed on any volume other than the "C:" volume. Also Steam installs to the SSD which invariably means a quicker download and install times. For games that are read/write intensive I leave them where they are (Crusader Kings II for example). All other games I copy to my non-SSD "E:" volume under "\Games" and then use the "mklink /J" command to "trick" Steam into believing the files are still on the "C:" volume. For example:

mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\saints row the third" "E:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\saints row the third"

The folder structure doesn't need to reflect Steam on the other drive like mine does. For my own mental clarity I left the Steam folder structure the same on the "E:" volume. I have other non-game related folders similarly linked.

After moving and linking you can check which folders are linked and which are physically on the "C:" volume by looking in properties, linked folders should be 0KB in size if done correctly.

The only problem I have encountered is Valve Source games which do not use a folder structure, such TF2. These games usually use .gcf files directly in the "steamapps" folder. You could move and link the entire "steamapps" folder or try "mklink /H" to link the files individually. I could not get it to the "mklink /H" command to work and left them as is. They are only 4GB or so on out of 240GB, so no big loss.