Maximum PC

Hello all!
I am finally sinking the cash into my first SSD. This one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227688 seems to be within my budget and many people have seemed to like OCZ products so this is the one i have been considering.
I do not plan on installing my OS on this drive though, i only intend on using it for games performance and faster load times on applications i use most frequently (photoshop, Crysis 2, SC2, etc.) Basically my questions revolve around what i need to do to set this up. On a mechanical hard drive, it's pretty much just plug and play anymore if there is no raid setup or anything to do, but with SSD's i've heard that you need to enable trim support and set up the drive in the bios. But if i'm not using this as an OS drive, can i just install it and go or are there more steps to complete? Does trim only work if this drive is the OS drive?
Any help, guides, or suggestions to installing an SSD NOT for the OS but just for gaming would be great.
Thanks all!!

Asus P6T
i7-930 @ 3.4Ghz
6gb DDR 3 Corsair Dominator Tri-channel
2 EVGA GTX 470's in SLI
H50 liquid cooler
640 gb 7200rpm HDD for OS
1TB WD Caviar Black (Storage)

Seems to me if you don't install the operating system on the ssd you are wasting your money. The operating system runs everything and you want it to be a snappy as you can get it, if you are worrying about load times buy a V-Raptor and install your games on it.

Trim is run in the background in win7.

Nasty

ok, so i guess it wouldn't be a big deal to install the OS on the ssd. I'll just make sure to save my important stuff elsewhere before i blow away the current HDD. But when i install the ssd, is there some sort of settings i need to enable in the bios or any programs i should be running for the ssd to run optimally? Is Trim automatically enabled or do i need to enable it?

For trim to work in win 7 you need AHCI mode enabled in the bios, it is best to do this before installing windows. If windows is already installed you will have to follow this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976/en

Always update the firmware on your drive. According to these people, use IDE instead of AHCI when you do it.

Never defragment this drive, it will kill it in short order. Shut off the defrag process for the ssd.

I found this very informative article on TRIM and win 7, scroll to the bottom for win 7.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/wiki/ ... n_a_VERTEX

OCZ supplies a utility to clean up your drive and this article tells you how to do it so the system runs factory fresh. The bottom tool on the list:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum ... orum-Tools

Nasty

Nastyman, this SSD has a Sandforce controller and, according to this guide: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum ... post567568, Sandforce controller OCZ drives should have their firmware updates flashed with the drives connected to the SATA ports in AHCI mode (OCZ SSDs with Indilinx controllers should be flashed with the drives attached to SATA ports in IDE mode in the BIOS). Everything else that you posted is true, though.

actually you dont, the stock MS win7 IDE driver supports TRIM also. AHCI drivers from Microsoft, Intel, and AMD all do too of course. others (are there any?) may not.

but AHCI mode is highly recommended for performance reasons, random I/O speeds will be lower in IDE mode.

Thank you all for your comments and help! I received the drive in the mail yesterday, installed it and it's the fastest drive I've ever seen! Windows boots up in under 20 seconds, ms word doesn't even take a single second to load...not that ms word was a big deal anyway... And my games loadmincredibly fast! The only complaint I have is that I should have got a bigger one haha. 90gb will work for now though. Ahci is enabled and disk defray has been turned off.

I do stillmhave one question though. When I was installing windows, im booted from the cd and it loaded up the setup files, but then at the screen with the selection boxes to choose your timezone and computer name and drive to install to, it took FOREVER for this box to appear. I was staring at the background screen for like 5 minutes before the setup menu finally showed up. At first i thought I had a cable not fully seated or something, but I checked and rechecked by cables, restarted andq checked all the settings in the bios as well anqd found nothing wrong. I decided to wait it out and just see what happened and it finally worked.

So any ideas why it took such a long pause in the startup? Nota big deal now, because it's fast and working great. But just wondering. Windows experience index score gives this drive a 7.6. Thanks all!!