Thinking of getting SSD

[cheapshots]

hey guys,

im thinking of getting a ssd for my computer which atm doesnt have one. price wise ive found either the:

- Corsair Force Series 3 60GB SSD
- Crucial M4 SSD 64GB

im thinking of running my windows 7 on it and a few games such as bf3 and chrome on it. which of these two are better/would you prefer?
im in australia and i can pick these up for around 130 each so their the same price.

also my main HDD which im running off is a 500gb Seagate i think and im wondering if you can easily transfer the operating system across without having to wipe all my 400gbish worth of games currently installed as it will be a big pain? some are advertised with coming with transfer kits and im wondering how these would work as id be transferring from a 500gb to a 60/64gb hdd? (yes i know i dont want all of it copied, but can you even choose?) so is it worth getting the transfer kit or not?

when that is all finnaly installed, is it as simple as installing say a new game to the say blank 500gb one by just choosing install directory and that will be fine?

im also thinking of getting 2x2gb more g.skill ram as i already have that installed and i can pick it up for around 30bucks. im currently running an i5 2500k, 560ti geforce OC and i only really use it for internet, games (bf3), movies. so i was wondering if its worth it to upgrade or i wont see much performance increase?

thanks

 

[Hurthan]

I would take the Crucial M4 - you will get a bit more space and this drive has better reported reliability then the Corsair Force Series.
With Windows on the SSD you can easily install a game on your normal hard drive - just use custom install and you can decide the install path.
I went personally from 4 gb to 8 gb on a similar system and noticed a bit snappier system. The biggest performance increase however will be getting a SSD for your system.

With regards to transferring a existing Windows installation to a SSD - I have no experience with it, I have read however it can take some time to do so compared to doing a clean install. I usually see people recommend doing a fresh install of windows.

 

[cheapshots]

yeah i started reading a bit and am decided on the m4. what is the lifespan like on these?
just need to pay off some debts to pay for these heh

so i should be putting windows7, bf3, chrome(should you put browsers on it?), MS Word? anything else?

dammit, i read the review on here, and i want the 128gb one now not the 64gb.. arghh. haha. $210 bucks for it...
thanks

 

[Hurthan]

This is from the product info on Crucials website :

Drive Endurance :

64 GB SSD : 36TB=20GB per day for 5 years
128 GB SSD : 72TB=40GB per day for 5 years

How much data you write per day on the drive really depends on how many hours a day you use your PC and what for obviously.
I think normal is about 10-15 GB per day.

 

[cheapshots]

how much is it normal to write by just windows running each day and playing bf3 or something? i doubt id use 20/40gb a day?

 

[Hurthan]

I measured my SSD write activity to 656,7 MB write per hour, this was with using firefox, msn messeger, thunderbird mail client. Obviously with more programs in use disk activity goes up.
I did one round in BF3 - 10 minutes - measured disk write to 266 MB.

But once you have your SSD you can measure this yourself to give you an idea of life expectancy of the SSD. I use a program called SSDReady.