System advice

[MrPompey]

Hi,

I'm looking to spend around £2k on a gaming PC from which i also run Adobe CS6 and will have a large archive of images as a photographer

I probably look to spend this every 4 years so buying in the next few weeks means I also need to think about future proofing.

I think the way to go is an SSD as the first hard-drive with o/s sitting on it and a 2nd large hard-drive for image storage (which will be backed up to external hard-drives and to a cloud back-up provider)

As always its a balance of cost v practicality v future proofing

I'm wondering if a 400gb SSD is going to be sufficient to hold the O/S and key apps for fast boot-up and future proofed for 4 years or so. I'm not that worried about games booting of the standard 2nd hard-drive which I'm thinking of around a 2-4 TB size

I've never used an SSD so have no idea of their speed v standard hard-drives and 4 years ago they were too expensive for me to consider plus their reliability, always a key one

Any practical or first hand views that people can confirm that would help me? I would be very grateful for any help here

Thanks

 

[Frank100]

Hi,

When comparing SSDs with traditional HDDs the speed difference is very significant but even within what you'd call SSDs there is significant variety of speed. Now you can choose between a SSD, with a standard SATA interface, M.2 SATA, which requires a compatible slot on the motherboard and is like a RAM chip. Lastly there is PCI-E SSDs, which plug into a PCI-E slot on the motherboard.

The M.2 SATA chips offer a significant speed boost over a SATA SSD and without a big price jump. They're what I would recommend for your budget and needs. PCI-E SATA is expensive by comparison.

As for space I would think 480-512GB, depending on what type of SSD/M.2 SATA you choose will be plenty for all your programs for four years. There's nothing to stop you adding a further SSD in the future though and installing any new programs onto that instead of the C: drive.

Many motherboards only have one M.2 SATA slot but higher end ones have two. If you did want to add a second in the future you'd need to be sure the board you selected supported two. You could add a number of SATA SSDs easily as well.

Windows 7 doesn't natively support M.2 SATA. It can be made to work if you have compatible drivers that can be loaded in at the start on the Windows installation process. Windows 10 does natively support M.2 SATA and will be easy to install. I know many people still like Windows 7 and if you wanted to use it you probably are better off with a SSD. My recommendation would be the Samsung 850 series over the Kingston SSDNow.

I hope that helps.

Frank100

 

[Resistance100]

We'll see, I'm only going by the MS email I had in reply

In the meantime anyone able to help on the question please. I have an ASUS ROG Maximus IX Hero ATX Mobo in a Fractal Define R5 mid tower case. I have as part of the build a 1TB SSD and a 2TB HDD. Im wanting to add a 3rd drive, a 2TB SSD.

What Im asking PCS is:
1. Can I add a 3rd drive, do I have a spare SATA connection
2. Do I need to do anything to the existing drive bays to fit a further SSD

Thanks

Looking at the site, there's 6 sata connections so you should be fine for that

ASUS USA

ASUS is a leading company driven by innovation and commitment to quality for products that include notebooks, netbooks, motherboards, graphics cards, displays, desktop PCs, servers, wireless solutions, mobile phones and networking devices. ASUS ranks among BusinessWeek’s InfoTech 100 for 12...

www.asus.com

Looking at the case

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/D1ryLZXJu0S.pdf

There's a couple of spaces behind the motherboard to mount an SSD. (Plus i'd imagine there is more space as well you can attach it to)

Hope that helps

 

[MrPompey]

Looking at the site, there's 6 sata connections so you should be fine for that

ASUS USA

ASUS is a leading company driven by innovation and commitment to quality for products that include notebooks, netbooks, motherboards, graphics cards, displays, desktop PCs, servers, wireless solutions, mobile phones and networking devices. ASUS ranks among BusinessWeek’s InfoTech 100 for 12...

www.asus.com

Looking at the case

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/D1ryLZXJu0S.pdf

There's a couple of spaces behind the motherboard to mount an SSD. (Plus i'd imagine there is more space as well you can attach it to)

Hope that helps

Thats great - Thank you