Running SSD as boot drive and upgrading

[moviefan]

I'm building an Phenom II x6 1055TD Evo system and have been counselled in the New Build forum that using an SSD as the boot drive is a good fast option. But then I read in some posts about long-term degradation as well as that SSDs aren't supposed to be written to often. My knowledge is limited to the posts here, and since time is essential, I turn to my TH gurus to answer this question:
If SSD isn't to be written to ofter and there is long-term degradation, what effect will MS and other app updates have on SSD as a boot drive and will these updates speed up the degradation time frame?
To me, these aren't idle questions considering SSD's expense. Also, how do SSD affect RAM performance? Since I've only used Intel chip-based systems, I'm used to needing more RAM than the minimum. Will I need more than 4GB for a Phenom II x6 055TD Evo/ASUS M4A87TD Evo AM3 AMD 870 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard or will the 90Gb SSD that I'm considering using in this build as a boot drive allow me to use only 4GB RAM?

Also this system will be used for video encoding/editing and the Internet research for mywriting. Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[arges86]

I love the Crucial RealSSD C300 that i recently got. Its amazing.
With the advent of TRIM (http://bit.ly/dbv5gC), the quick wear due to constant writing is not as big of an issue as it once was. Win7 supports this natively.

If you can afford it get a SSD, the 90 GB is fine, just put your My Documents, ect. on another hard drive. My drive has the the Marvell Controller, but the SandForce Controller seems to be the most well regarded for SSD.

I've never heard of needing more RAM w/ a SSD. When i added mine, it was to an existing system and there was nothing but an increase in performance.

 

[mark_k]

If you are editing get at least 6 gb RAM.
Get a 90 or larger SSD.
Becuse you have on board SATA 6Gb/s get the Crucial RealSSD C300 ( I like the 120 GB) or wait for February for new SSD's.

 

[xrodney]

Just disable prefetch and other cashing functions for SDD and move Temp, Swap and probably some programs that often write to their directories to 2nd HDD.
That way you reduce amount of write cycles on disk and increase its lifespan.

Each SSD have some amount of spare cells that replace those damaged by too many write cycles, all this is done by SSD controller without your knowledge.

Personally I Have just 30GB data on 100GB SDD (win7 plus some basic programs) and rest on 1TB disk. My boot time was originally 14 seconds (20 after year of use) and applications starting 2-3 times faster then when not using SSD.

SDD have no effect on memory performance (just files and libraries are read from SSD much faster then from regular hdd amking system overaly faster and more responsive), but you can consider reducing paging file to small value like 100MB (just for sake of some programs that require write at least small amount of data to it) if you have more memory then you use.
6-8GB ram for W7 is sufficient for turning paging space unless you run some really memory intensive programs like video editing or cad.

 

[moviefan]

Best answer selected by moviefan.