Advice for using an SSD as a boot drive!

I've never actually owned an SSD before and with the PC I ordered I chose a 256GB SSD as my boot drive and a 1TB HDD for all of my non-essential media storage.

The idea was to have windows run faster and put all of my essential programs (Anti-virus, and other sometimes annoying programs that start up when the PC does) and possibly a few of my most commonly played video games that I've never un-installed from my PC like most blizzard titles on the SSD.

Outside of that I'm not really sure how I should be handling the storage of my files, what I should put where.

I know when you install a game or program you can choose where it goes, so I know with like my steam library I'll be saving it to my HDD.

But what about things like browsers, flash, clients for things like spotify or razer synapse or NVIDIA's new optimizer software?

And also do shortcuts made from HDD programs still function the same on the desktop even though the desktop is on the SSD?

I just want to make sure I don't fill the SSD too fast, or wear it out with constant writes/reads and make sure I'm doing this right from the moment I start using the new PC before any files get loaded to the SSD that for some reason won't be transferable without a ton of hoops to jump through.

So, any advice or guidelines that any of you out there follow concerning this? I know it sounds silly to worry about this, but I tend to do that a lot lol.

Edited by ZyloWolfBane - 04 Mar 2014 at 7:17pm

Originally posted by Bahger Chiming in here because I'm in exactly the same boat.  It will be my first SSD, too, and it's only 128GB.  I have looked into it and at the moment my plan is to install all games (and the Steam client) to the HD, as, apart from improving load times, putting games on the SSD has no effect on game performance whatsoever.  There's a guy on this forum who is a huge power-user of Flight Simulator X and runs it, and its 300GB of scenery add-ons, from a dedicated SSD; makes sense but this seems to be a special case.   I believe iTunes wants to be on the boot drive (the SSD) but can access data files from the HD.  I hope so.  I want to get Win 8.1 (another new experience for me) to keep all user data on the HD.  I'm not sure if digital video editing programs such as Sony Vegas should be installed to the SSD in order to take advantage of its superior performance; perhaps someone can advise.   I think it's going to be a bit trial-and-error.  I hope both Win 8.1 and any individual programs that need to go on the SSD boot drive will be good about allowing me to store their user data on the HD.  As I said, I'm not sure I play any game that needs super-optimised load times so I may not install any games at all on the SSD unless people here advise otherwise.   Am I correct in assuming that all (usually small) background utilities (Avira AV, Malwarebytes, Spyhunter 4, FRAPS, Teamspeak, scanning software, browsers, CCleaner, Auslogics disk defrag, iCloud) can, or should, go on the C: drive (SSD) or does it make no difference?   I do not mean to hijack your thread; I'm hoping that since we are in exactly the same situation, we can learn about it together.

Oh no problem, I mean I've had a few friends recommend a few things to me but they're used to using the smallest GB size possible for their SSDs, like yours.

I thought maybe by getting one slightly larger it might allow me to be a little lazy about it lol.

I'm also getting windows 8.1 to save about $100, even though I prefer Windows 7, but my wife's laptop has had 8 since it came out and we've had nothing but problems with it.

One update didn't update properly (No idea why) and it bricked the system, we had to pay to get it reinstalled, just a huge mess.

So yeah, it's gonna be a learning experience.

I had planned to possibly upgrade the 256GB to a full TB later on in the year or possibly next year when the prices come down a little (Even though some of the samsung models are roughly 0.55 per GB which is amazing!) so then I'll be able to mirror the original SSD to that one and not worry what I put on it.

And then the extra HDD can be for totally random media that I save, the 256GB could then be reformatted and used as a dedicated gaming drive too.

*Shrug* But for now I'd like to know what the proper procedure would be for the time being lol.

Edited by ZyloWolfBane - 04 Mar 2014 at 8:04pm

I honestly don't use my 1tb drive i think i wasted money adding that to my build since i'll never use it. I just put everything on my ssd although i do have a large ssd drive which is 447gb so wish i could help y'all.

Well I was originally going to reply to Bahger's post, but since you're both here I will tell you of my experiences so far. I purchased my system back in June 2013 with a 120GB SSD.

First of all, if you have the option to do a custom install and change the drive, you can install on your HD rather than your SSD. You do not have to install iTunes on the SSD. If you do, it will want to save all your music there too, which will take up a lot of space.

I've tried to keep most programs on my HD, including my anti-virus software. I even found out how to change all the library folders to the HD (Documents, Movies, Pictures, Videos and Downloads). Although I can't remember how to do that now. I googled it at the time. Even though you install all of these programs on to your HD, most of the time something of that program will still be installed on the SSD. I assume this is so it works correctly with Windows.

I have Steam and all of it's games installed on the HD, with Origin and BF4 installed on the SSD. I found a way to install BF3 on the HD in case I want to play that again. The reason I installed BF4 on the SSD is because it will load maps between rounds faster, and I will be one of the first ones up and running at the start of each round.

With pretty much only Win7, Origin and BF4 installed on my 120GB SSD, I only have 3.23GB of space left. So I'll probably have to upgrade to a 256 or 500GB drive at some point. My HD is 1TB, and I'm using 202GB now, as I have a lot of music on there. If you get a good HD, like the WD Caviar I got, you probably won't notice a whole lot of difference in bringing up regular programs. It will load up in 5 seconds instead of 2.

So that has been my experience so far. Hope it helps.

Really it comes down to personal preference. Operating system is a given for the SSD. After that, put on your SSD whatever you want to load quickly, and whatever you have space for.