Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

For sure. After installing everything, I only have 32GBs left in my 128 SSD.

 

80gb should be plenty for windows, your startup programs, and any frequently used programs. of course if you put your entire game collection on it as well it will be pathetically small.

im considering getting the 80gb ssd and sticking a 500gb momentus XT into the main bay

 

I've only got Chrome, CS5, Rhino, Alias, and Starcraft 2 installed but I don't think there's much else. Maybe Solidworks/MS Office sometime in the future, but I can imagine easily filling up the rest of the drive. Might have to figure out what to move over the HD if I do run out of space. I've read SDDs perform better when they aren't close to full, if that's true what number would I want to stay under? 70%? 80%?

Does the SSD only affect the program start up time, or does the program perform better during application use if it's installed on an SSD? If I'm editing a photo on my mechanical drive with Photoshop, will there be a difference whether Photoshop is installed on the SSD or not?

 

Also, I ended up purchasing the WD Scorpio Black 750GBs. That got better reviews and overall performance (according to benchmarks) than the Momentus XT

 

really? i havent taken a look at the scorpio black yet. will probably do so. thanks for that.

IIRC the drives with TRIM solve the issue of performance degradation

 

This is the review I looked at: Western Digital's Scorpio Black 750GB notebook hard drive - The Tech Report - Page 1

Price is about the same as the Momentus.

Edit: Oops, I was comparing it to the Momentus 750GBs at the time, so I don't know about the 500GB one, but looks like those numbers are there as well so you can compare it yourself

 

i was referring to the momentus XT, its the hybrid drive with the 4gb ssd on board

 

I realize that, but it seems the WD is still coming out ahead most of the time for whatever reason.

 

Sure

What I've managed to do on my M4600 w/ 16g 1600 RAM(receveid with 500gb 7200trs/min)

1° step :
-Installed Win7 x64 on the Intel 310 SSD 80 Go
-Installed PRO Apps on it (CS5.5/3DS Max/Vue 9.5)
-Removed the pagefile.sys (16gb), created it for only 1gb
=>gotta about 32GB of free space on the 310 SSD 80go (about 40% free space)

2nd step :
-Created 3 partitions on the 500gb :
Win7(for games)/DATA/TMP (for temp files)
-Installed W7 x64 ont first partition for games, office and others apps
-Reserved the DATA partition for personal files : (moved all user folder like music/pictures/documents and so on on it) (for BOTH W7 partitions)
-Moved all the temp folder and firefox cache on the tmp partition (for BOTH W7 partitions).

3° step

Created 2 backup partitions on an external 2.5" 250Gb for backup my 2 W7 x64 partitions (save A LOT of time if need to reinstall everything) : about 7/8 min for réinstalling W7 w/all programs/update...

=> as the SSD performs A LOT better on reading, I've managed to move on other partitions all the cache and tmp folder, as a result, it's very very responsive for system reactivity and apps lauching ( about 3 sec for lauching PPRO CS5.5... )
The latency time of Intel is very good : 0.065 ms, compared to the 0.1 ms of the samsung or other brands....

 

Why do you need a Windows installed for Apps and for games?