SSD as boot drive?

I'm having some minor irritations with my current PC setup that are having me considering doing a clean install of Windows 7. I figured that the occasion might be an ideal time to move to a solid state drive for my boot drive.

Right now I have a 1TB traditional 7200 RPM HDD I'm using as my boot drive and a 500 GB traditional 7200 RPM HDD I use for additional storage. If I went to a SSD, I'd be going with probably a 120 or 128 GB drive for the boot drive and then use the 1 TB HDD I'm currently using as my boot drive for additional storage. The 500 GB drive would move into an external enclosure.

Anyone have any recommendations for or against this plan?

Great stuff, guys. I've always spent a lot of time researching hard drives for the best reliability stats, but once it's in there I've sort of forgotten about it. Drives might migrate from system to system, but I never had a strategy or put much thought into what I stored where. You've given me a bit to think about.

I only play a few games, so I'm not worried about that. Even if I only use up 60 or 70 GB with everything installed, it sounds like I should keep the SSD for the OS and the programs, since that's where the speed difference is. On the other hand, I would have never thought of pointing the caches to the 1 TB drive if you hadn't pointed it out. I'm wondering if it's possible to set your Recorded TV folder to a secondary drive, because with that I could easily see filling up the SSD quickly. I've got 260 GB tied up in recorded programs now without any particular backlog.

It's appealing to me to have all of my data stored on a non-boot HD. I haven't messed about with drive images since XP, but it would be worthwhile to create a clean program environment with all of the programs I use regularly installed that could be backed up as an image on a thumb drive, and then just ghosted back from time to time as problems pop up. The biggest obstacle to upgrading hard drives has always been data migration. If the SSD is used only for programs, then even if it fails, I'll have lost nothing irreplaceable.

I just installed WinDirStat on your recommendation, and it's completely fascinating how the storage usage breaks down. Some of my assumptions were completely off; I expected the Recorded TV folder to be the largest chunk, and it was, but Steam takes up way more space than I expected, and my Music and Pictures folder takes up far less.

My case only has space for two harddrives, but it has space for two optical drives, and I'm only using one. Is it possible to mount a third harddrive in the second optical bay? This would give me a net gain of ~120 GB instead of a net loss of ~346 GB if I lose the 500 GB second harddrive in favor of the 128 GB SSD. My motherboard supports up to four SATA connections.

Thanks the tip. I committed this afternoon and went with the following (to borrow Dave's table format from another thread):

Item	Cost	Details	Link
Solid State Drive	$176.99	Crucial M4 CT128M4SSD2 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)	http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148442
SSD Mounting Bracket	$6.39	2.5-inch SSD / HDD to 3.5-inch Bracket Mount Adapter	http://www.amazon.com/2-5-inch-3-5-inch-Bracket-Mount-Adapter/dp/tech-data/B005FCZP08
HDD Mounting Bracket	$9.95	Nexus DoubleTwin Hard Drive Vibration Isolator	http://www.amazon.com/Nexus-DoubleTwin-Drive-Vibration-Isolator/dp/B001AZHS04

My plan at the moment is to mount the SSD where the 500 GB HDD is now using the 2.5-inch to 3.5-inch mount adapter, and then mount the 500 GB HDD in the vacant optical bay using the Nexus. I should have enough SATA III cables, but I picked up a couple on Monoprice just to be safe.

I went with the drive I did because it was the bestselling one on Newegg, and -- of the drives with a lot of user reviews -- it seemed to have the lowest percentage of 1 and 2 star reviews. From what I can tell, SSDs are still a bit of a crap shoot. I'm just planning on using it for the OS and my programs so, if worst comes the worst, I shouldn't lose anything too important should I end up one of the unlucky ones. I went with the 128 GB over the 64 GB because I have a lot of programs installed right now and wanted enough space for future service packs, etc. Someone like Ken would probably be able to answer better than I would, but if you're just using the computer as an HTPC, 64 GB would probably be enough for the programs you'd have installed. I selected it in Firefox, copied the HTML into Notepad, subbed in my values, dumped all the excess rows, ran it through a web app to strip out all of the white space and line breaks, and then pasted it into the reply box. I used it mainly because it was one of the only tables that forum didn't garble. I used my own custom table last year for my 2011 Film List, and it was an absolute nightmare.

To be fair, those drives are a year or two old. Also, $180 for 128 GB is a huge price difference compared to what the same capacity would have been a couple years ago.

None of which makes those failure rates untroubling. Having the boot drive go would be a major inconvenience, knocking the computer out of commission until the OS and programs can be reinstalled on a new (or repurposed) drive. On the other hand, a boot time of 6-20 seconds versus three to four minutes is a huge difference from a user standpoint.

I got all of the components a couple days ago, but a horrendous stomach flu had me laid up and prevented me from really digging into this project until today.

Windows 7 is installing on the SSD now, but so far it's been a lesson in mounting brackets; namely, make sure the ones you buy are compatible with your case. The 2.5" to 3.5" brackets I bought for the SSD are designed for drives that are mounted horizontally in the tower. My tower mounts the HHDs vertically. Since there's enough space in the case, my interim solution is to mount the SSD horizontally, screwed in on only one side. The SSD has no moving parts, and the tower doesn't get jostled that much so I figure I should be okay for now. Eventually, I'll either buy brackets that work with my case, or drill out the proper holes on the brackets I have.

The "Nexus DoubleTwin Hard Drive Vibration Isolator" 3.5" to 5.25" brackets fit like a dream for one HDD, but there's no way in hell I could have fit two harddrives into the optical bay with it. My case simply doesn't have enough room.

Will update again once I have things up and running.

Typing this from the new installation on the SSD. Wow is it a huge difference in speed. 47 Windows updates installed in about three minutes. Boot time is about 10 seconds. Right now I'm reformatting my 1 TB harddrive that used to be the boot drive so I can use it all for storage. Made the mistake of doing a full format, though, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave the computer on half the night. Once I've got the Ceton installed again, I'm going to create a disk image in case the SSD craps out on me down the road.

Okay, typing this from my second install of Win7 on the SSD. The first time through, I couldn't get the primary user profile to store off the SSD, and in the process of trying to move it really messed up the registry. In case anyone else runs into the issue, here's how I ultimately got my User Profile onto the 1 TB drive instead of the SSD:

1) During the Windows 7 install, I created a dummy account just for the first login.

2) From the desktop, I opened a cmd window with Administrator privileges and entered the following prompt to enable the Administrator account: net user administrator /active:yes

3) Rebooted, logged into the Administrator account, and deleted the dummy account I created during the install.

4) Opened Regedit, backed up the registry (fool me once...), and navigated to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft Windows NT\Current Version\ProfileList

5) Changes the following: ProfilesDirectory to B:\Users from %SystemRoot%\Users; Public to B:\Users\Public from %SystemRoot%\Users\Public.

6) Rebooted, logged back in as Administrator and created a new account in the Control Panel. Logged out, and logged in with the new account, which was created on B:\ instead of C:\.

7) Disabled the administrator account again.