SSD C: drive with conventional platter type D: drive, where to put stuff?

[Chris Wilson]

I have a Dell 1720 laptop into which I have put a OCZ SSD hard drive of 120GB/s size. The laptop has 4 gig of RAM (although I know XP 32 bit won't see it all), and it has two hard drive bays and I am going to put a 500GB/s conventional drive of 7200 RPM with a 16MB cache. I will have to run XP as a lot of automotive diagnostic apps I run check the OS before loading and won't even load under Windows 7, even in emulation mode. Nor will many run under 64 bit XP. The main usage of this laptop is in my workshop for ECU mapping and diagnostic work with things like a USB oscilloscope connected to it. As the SSD is of modest capacity for these days, and some of these diagnostic apps are huge as they also contain parts databases, vast collections of wiring diagrams etcetera I am wondering what impact putting them on the platter type D: drive, and just XP pro on the SSD drive? I am not at all knowledgeable about this sort of stuff, but if there's only a very limited performance hit I'd rather have most apps on the 500GBs secondary drive. What should I do please? Thanks.

[caseys]

Should in theory be find Chris, many programs create references to their files upon installation, so you'll need to install the hdd then install the programs onto it. It's very rare that you get programs which dictate being on the c:

 

I did check for you amongst my pile of disks but I have nothing larger than a 320gb. 500gb sata aren't that costly tbh brand new and then you'll have a retailers warranty.

[DamanC]

In short, you want as much as possible on the SSD.

 

That being said, an OS on a SSD is a vast improvement. If you have large files or potentially large files, stick them on a traditional drive.

 

If you can, wait to March/April next year to get the traditional drive due to them being vastly overpriced because of the Thailand floods.

[kill1308]

An SSD with Windows XP isn't ideal due to lack of TRIM support.... but you are fine to install programs onto your other HDD. There are ways to make them work a bit more nicely with XP, but Win7 is the only OS (from Microsoft) that natively supports TRIM. Anyway, what you're proposing is fine. This is how many gaming PC's are setup.... Small SSD with OS installed, mechanical SATA with Data/Programs etc, so your plan is absolutely fine. Your OS will still benefit from the SSD from a speed perspective.

 

If you have the space available, there's also no harm in installing your most resource hungry apps on the SSD (as it's a decent size) as the faster read/write times will improve the loading times of the applications and potentially their overall operation if they are read/write heavy.

 

If you wanted to run Windows 7 64-bit and still retain the use of your old apps, you could run an XP Virtual Machine (old apps rarely work in compatibility mode as you say). I've setup an XP Virtual machine on laptops on the shop floor where i work (co-incidentally also with SSD's) where I work as they wanted Win7 but still wanted to be able to use old software to connect to the machines we build. If you want to think about this for the future, feel free to PM me if you need any help...

[caseys]

An SSD with Windows XP isn't ideal due to lack of TRIM support.... . Your OS will still benefit from the SSD from a speed perspective.

 

I don't think Chris has to be bothered by TRIM support for his uses Even depending upon churn of data to the SSD, a manual TRIM on occasion is easy enough if really needed. Agreed tho that for many older computers now, an SSD gives more performance bang for buck than more ram/CPU/GPU upgrades now, it's awesome what SSD has done for the longevity of some equipment now.

 

If you have the space available, there's also no harm in installing your most resource hungry apps on the SSD (as it's a decent size) as the faster read/write times will improve the loading times of the applications and potentially their overall operation if they are read/write heavy.

 

A little bit of a misnomer, it all depends on the IO profile of the workload, I agree for random read/write generally SSD is faster than anything else consumer made. Massive sequential read/write the differences between 7.2k/10k drives and SSD is not worth it from a £:Gb perspective. Also depends upon the blocksize of the read/write too. Also too some SSD can be bottlenecked by the drive interface - hence PCIe flash cards (also watch what fusion IO are trying to do).

 

If you wanted to run Windows 7 64-bit and still retain the use of your old apps, you could run an XP Virtual Machine (old apps rarely work in compatibility mode as you say). I've setup an XP Virtual machine on laptops on the shop floor where i work (co-incidentally also with SSD's) where I work as they wanted Win7 but still wanted to be able to use old software to connect to the machines we build. If you want to think about this for the future, feel free to PM me if you need any help...

 

A possiblity, but he's then using an SSD to install W7 on, then an install of XP in a VM inside of that, even with a TinyXP install, it's still a waste of space *if* W7 isn't going to be used for anything and I imagine that this laptop will be sat in Chris' garage, not connected to the net so security latest & greatest probably aren't a concern, or things like closed memory spaces etc like W7 has for security.

 

I think the motorsport apps Chris uses are quite bespoke and unfortunately apps within that category take ages to transition to more modern OS support, for instance look at some of the ECUs which still use a parallel/serial cable to program with! Even most switch kit has expired that and moved to USB.