How to use my 128GB SSD?

[loganex]

Got me a new Crucial m4 128gb, mmmmhmmm. SO. How to make it worth $100?

1. Boot drive in my desktop. Main task is games, games and more gaemz along with MS Office, web, PDFs, standard stuff. I have adobe CS5 on there but only minor photo editing etc. Pros: fast everything. Cons: potentially shorter drive life with heavier use as main drive, more management as I would have to rotate games and other files on and off. (I'm a dude who has 300GB of my Steam library installed right now, just in case the fancy strikes me to play some old game -- that would have to change.)

2. Cache my 640gb WD Black in my desktop. Same tasks as above, and for what I'm doing normally, cache would give me plenty of performance. Pros: Low maintenance, fast boot times, game and program loads. Cons: File transfers remain slow (so what, don't do it often), sort of a big drive to use on cache

3. Main drive in my lappy, a Dell XPS 15 L502x sandy bridge. I was sort of wanting to get an ssd for this anyway, but thought 128gb would feel tight. Similar uses as the desktop but less games and more productivity, including SPSS. Pros: fast everything. Cons: will I feel like I'm constantly running out of disk space?

TL;DR
Put my 128gb SSD in my desktop as 1. main drive, 2. cache drive, or 3. In my lappy as main drive

 

[F1shF4t]

I'd pick option 1.
Extra wear on SSD is not a consern. You can use symbolic links or steam game mover (whatever its actually called) to move games to SSD which benifit from it.

 

[bryanW1995]

You can do 1 + 2 at the same time. I did it for 4 months, it was ridiculously cool. Make sure to only cache 18.6 gb (the recommended amt from intel, anyway) and you'll still have ~ 100gb for the OS + a lot of other commonly-used apps.

edit: here's the link for how to use one ssd as your boot/os drive + cache at the same time:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2172381

 

[loganex]

You can do 1 + 2 at the same time. I did it for 4 months

Why did you stop?

 

[bryanW1995]

The allure of 2x256 gb m4's in RAID 0 for $430 shipped. I was originally planning an IVB upgrade, but it was so underwhelming that I spent the $$ on the ssd's, instead. Plus, my 80gb x25m g2 was small enough that I didn't use the ssd for anything other than the OS + cache, whereas with a larger 128gb ssd you will have plenty of extra space for your favorite programs.

I've tried the m4's without RAID 0 and also in RAID 0 mode btw, and I would say that un-RAIDed they aren't enough of an upgrade to really make much difference to me. However, when they're in RAID mode the improvement is immediately obvious vs my old ssd, enough so that I'm glad I took that next step.