Due to ongoing issues, I need to do a reinstall of Windows, going to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 at the same time. As I only have the one hard drive, I think the easiest way to do this will be a clean install to a newly installed blank/new harddrive, is this right?

If so, I'm considering a small 64GB SSD boot drive, seeing as they're pretty affordable now and should give a decent boost to boot times etc? Or, am also considering the new 600GB Velociraptor, which looks mighty impressive?

What do the IT bod's on here reckon? Bother with the quicker drives, or just go a normal 7200RPM SATA drive?

An SSD for the C: partition and a normal one for the data partition would be my choice.

Oh, and some sort of backup drive that will cover the combined capacity of the above.

That probably makes sense, as SSD is extremely quick for access times but not so much for data transfer (I think). Consequently, they are best if you are reading loads of little files a lot. Which is what happens on your C: windows drive.

SSD drives work better with linux rather than Windows. SSD's can only handle a finite number of read/write operations, and Windows likes doing lots of read and writing to the disk. Mean time to failure for a Windows install on a SSD is less than Windows on a HDD or Linux on a SSD, everything else being equal.

Translation, get a HDD. If you're worried about boot times there are for more sensible ways to achieve it. E.g. faster computer, better PC housekeeping, better operating system.

Mean time to failure for a Windows install on a SSD is less than Windows on a HDD or Linux on a SSD

Interesting.

Is mean time to failure longer with linux in general tho than with windows?

SSD drives work better with linux rather than Windows. SSD's can only handle a finite number of read/write operations, and Windows likes doing lots of read and writing to the disk. Mean time to failure for a Windows install on a SSD is less than Windows on a HDD or Linux on a SSD, everything else being equal.

Source?

I was thinking about getting an SSD to boot from in the end I just got a new seagate 7200.12 1 TB as my old hard drive started to fail.

Im glad I did the 7200.12 gives a nice speed boost over my old hardrive which was a seagate 7200.10 or something.

And Have to say I've already managed to get my windows 7 boot partition to 60GB.

Ok this is excessive and its my fault, I think I may have installed all the langauge pack I have loads of games on their etc etc.

But for my main desktop I do think the boot drive needs to be a bit bigger than 64GB.

Still think you need to wait with SSDs for the hardware to mature and come down in price.

Saying that I ve been waiting for a couple of years.

(I do know I could have installed software somewhere else but it is nice to have it all together.)

ext3 is a journalling file system, as is ntfs, as is reiserfs.. how the 3 compare in terms of read/writes would need a bit of research. ext3 is less prone to fragmentation, threfore needs less defrags which i turns reduces the amount of read/writes.. different versions of Windows.. lots of variables. Choose your OS by what you want to run, not by how your disk might behave.

If it were me, for home, I'd buy the single bigger drive, and just hibernate rather than switch off if start up time is a problem. I'd spend the money saved on RAM, it'll make more overall difference.

If you have issues with your current install, then a clean install at least ticks off one box .. theres some nice tools built in for data trnasfer now so it's not too painful (user state migration tool I think its called).

you don't ever need to defrag an ssd drive, there is effectively no seek latency, therefore it offers no performance benefit

so… is it worth it or not?? 600GB Velociraptor goes for around £200, 64GB SSD goes for around £120 (for a good one)… I'm leaning towards the SSD even just for fun/cool factor, though maybe should go for a 128GB to be safer?

what you want is a cost / benefit analysis of ssd's and hd, like this

Waderider – I smell BS. Got a source for that?

SSDs rock my world, no way I'm going back. Do it. Unless you're moving big linear chunks of data a decent SSD will shit on the velociraptor from a great height.

But be sure to read about and get a good one. Probably a crucial/other indilinx based at that capacity?

(running a 40gb intel drive plus a 500gb platter drive here)

"If it were me, for home, I'd buy the single bigger drive, and just hibernate rather than switch off if start up time is a problem. I'd spend the money saved on RAM, it'll make more overall difference."

Assuming you've a half decent amount of RAM, the SSD makes more difference.

Boot times I don't care about, I always suspend my machines so they're instant on anyhow. Application load times come down (eclipse from 68s to 18s for me) but again that doesn't matter so much if I'm keeping stuff loaded. Where they kill is responsiveness.

^ of course my above advice depends what you need the machine for, if you're doing something memory bound obviously that would help. But then if you know your exact workload and can spec to suit you'd not be asking on here!

But again, from the position of actually owning a ssd unlike some posters above, for most computer use for me it makes the single biggest difference. I'd prioritise having a decent SSD over nearly any other component now.

On a 160GB Intel SSD here. Incredibly good, more or less no waiting for anything to load.

Waderider – Good amount of FUD in your post. Hard to compare Windows and Linux in such a way, especially since both support TRIM which lessens the effects of drive wear such that it becomes un-noticable within the life of the host machine.

What about power consumption?

Power-on draw for SSDs is less, consumption in use is negligibly in favour of SSDs, but it's the order of mW. Not enough to get more battery out a laptop.

(of course there's the indirect benefit of a given task taking less time to complete, so you can get more done in the same time)

Though also SSDs can lead to increased CPU use, which might cause faster drain for some use cases. E.g. I notice spotlight indexing on OSX is now a CPU bound affair. But you don't do that very often.

Agree it's hard to compare Linux & Windows SSD use. Certainly easy to set flags such as "noatime" with Linux so that it doesn't do a write each time a file is accessed. Ditto for disabling swap, ditto for disabling logging (think I log to ramfs on the eeePC). I'm sure it's also easy to do the Windows equivalent of all of the above, if you google enough and go through enough config windows.

This isn't academia requiring references; I suggest you read up on the topic yourself. Google suffices.

To get you started, regarding read/write cycles on SSD's:

From wikipedia:

"Flash-memory drives have limited lifetimes and will often wear out after 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 P/E cycles (1,000 to 10,000 per cell) for MLC, and up to 5,000,000 P/E cycles (100,000 per cell) for SLC.[42][43][44][45] Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this problem by spreading writes over the entire device, called wear leveling.[46]"

And this from the horses mouth (Microsoft), on Tom's Hardware:

"“Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs,” wrote Michael Fortin, one of Microsoft's Distinguished Engineers, in the Engineering Windows 7 blog."

(My argument would be why adapt an OS unsuitable for SSD's (Windows) when you could just start with one that uses its file system in a compatible manner (linux). Windows 7 still makes does a lot of read write cycles not directly instigated by the user. These comments from Microsoft show acknowledgement their OS has a problem due to write cycles).

From Techworld website regarding OS importance:

"According to Far, Mac OS X runs "a little faster than Vista" with an SSD drive, but Linux is "always faster" than Vista or Mac OS X – to the tune of 1 percent to 2 percent – because like Windows 2000, "it never runs anything in the background."

"If you really want to go inside [the OS numbers], Windows 98 was the fastest of all," Far says. But there's a downside: Windows 98 does not support wear-levelling technology, which evenly distributes data writes to NAND flash memory to ensure no single area of an SSD wears out faster than another. Far says his company's SSDs would wear out in only about a year when running Windows 98."

(Okay, this article is a year and half old, but it demonstrates OS importance).

My point is SSD's are the latest technology and early adopters shall have the usual burden to bear. They have a limited lifespan, and performance degrades over time as NAND gates expire – a whole other kettle of fish but connected to my original post. The advantages I read on this thread all seem true enough though. But I'd be buying a HDD.

My argument would be why adapt an OS unsuitable for SSD's (Windows) when you could just start with one that uses its file system in a compatible manner (linux)

Well there are lots of reasons for using Windows over Linux aren't there?

And only a true geek would big up Windows 98 when 7 is out 🙂

I have read up on the topic myself, and disagree with some of what you've said (and quoted). Linux "never running anything in the background" grates particularly.

Regarding wearing out NAND, yes it does, but as Dougal says not within any time period you'd care about. For example:

"Thus Intel will guarantee that you can write 100GB of data to one of its MLC SSDs every day, for the next five years, and your data will remain intact."

From http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/4

Yes IA, the "linux never runs anything in the background" is incorrect. Apologies. Trying to be too clever too quick…..just stating my opinion, something that fits in well round here.

you could just start with one that uses its file system in a compatible manner (linux)

All the major Linux FS were modified to support SSDs in a similar way to Windows 7. i.e. Adding trim support.