Maximum PC

Hey MaximumPC,

It's that time of year again (summer), which means.. upgrades!!!

I want to buy a 128gig or 256gig SSD to install windows 7+drivers+programs and a few games on.

My question is, if I run the SSD as my main harddrive to install windows 7 and if i keep the old samsung spinpoint F3 sataII 1TB harddrive only for storage, will there be a loss in performance? With only 128gigs, it will be hard to install all my programs after windows + drivers are installed (lack of space). therefore i will need to use the old sataII as storage. will the programs that are installed on the HDD run slower? will i be getting any compatibility issues? Also, is 4gigs enough ram nowadays?

Also which SSD do you think i should get? Thanks

my rig:
AMD X4 phenom II black edition 965 (oc'ed to 3.8ghz on air)
Gskillz ripjaws 2x2gig 1600mhz
gigabyte 870a-UD3
AMD HD6970 overclocked
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
silverstone olympia 650 watts - 54amps/single 12v rail

Hard drives affect the following:

• How fast a program will load and how fast it can load things.
• How smooth streaming data is. This usually affects video games since movies have a data rate that's much slower than any hard drive.
• How fast you can write something. This usually only happens with video editing programs.

For an SSD, I usually keep my main programs on it and everything else on the HDD.

4GB is good. If you really want, you can upgrade to 8GB. But no more than 8GB. No games are built in 64-bit and by default, Windows 64-bit only allows 2GB for 32-bit programs anyway (most games are good about keeping within this limit). If you really want to, you can upgrade. The only thing you might see is more response when you have a lot programs open at once and you switch back and forth between them.

Yes keep your old drive and use it for storage. As for what SSD to get I would choose one of the following: Samsung 830 series, Crucial m4, or Intel 520/whatever the new ones are that didn't come out yet.

Is 128 gigs enough to install windows 7 + bf3? i guess i can only have 1 game installed on a 128gig ssd... do you know what the actual size is after formatting? it must be under 100 gigs..

just ordered the crucial m4 128 gigs with a mounting bay and sata 3 cables. thanks for the advice!