SSD, hybrid or Velociraptor?

[Joost Schuttelaar]

160GB SSD, stick the rest (big stuff you don't access so often) on a secondary disk.

-- 

Joost Schuttelaar
The Hague, NL

On Feb 5, 2012, at 18:14 , Peter Korsten wrote:

> So... my primary hard disc, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, is getting a bit long in the tooth. I can have a look at defragmenting, and whilst Windows 7 proudly claims that there's 0% fragmentation, the freeware tool Defraggler says it's more like 22%. Hmm.
> 
> Anyway, after changing the motherboard, CPU, memory and graphics card, the slowest part is now the hard disc, and I was wondering what to replace it with. At work, my computer (a Core i7 860, double channel, 2.8 GHz) feels snappy and starts up really quickly; the computer at home (a Core i7 960, triple channel, 3.2 GHz) feels much slower. The difference is particularly evident when starting up a virtual machine, which is a matter of seconds, whereas at home it takes minutes (admittedly, from a low power/low performance disc).
> 
> The machine at work has a 500 GB Velociraptor and the only thing that is mildly concerning is that it does a chkdsk *very* often after being rebooted after, say, a week.
> 
> The fastest solution would be to get an SSD. However, I play a lot of games, and load times there is an issue. Recently, I installed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and it's a whopping 14 GB. Given that games regularly come in at 5 GB, a small-size SSD is simply not an option. 250 MB, the size of the Barracuda, would be the bare minimum.
> 
> But then, cost becomes an issue. An SSD easily costs £1 per GB, and spending £500 or so on a disc is just too much. A Velociraptor is less expensive, but there's the third option: those normal drives with an SSD cache.
> 
> All things considered, does anybody have some good advice?
> 
> - Peter
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