OK, so, with the release of a shiny new OS comes another round of PC configuration and playing about. I've actually resigned myself to the conclusion that's what I spend more of my time doing with my PC than actually just getting on and using it - but that's fine, if I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't do it!
So I upgraded to Windows 8 last night. And yes, I really do mean upgraded. I didn't do a fresh install as this is a gaming PC and games these days tend to come down the wire so a complete wipe and fresh install would have meant gigabytes upon gigabytes of downloads. That's the flip side to the instant gratification you get of buying a game and a couple of hours later you're immersed in playing it.
I learnt after my last accidental HDD wipe (yep, my fault!) that keeping all my save game folders for the various games on a folder in DropBox and using hard links to them so the games don't know they're not where they think they are is a great way to save my arse so there was no backup / restore required, just an in-situ upgrade.
SO, I have to say the upgrade went flawlessly. I learnt a long time ago to disconnect all drives other than the one you're installing to or you'll lose your custom bootloaders and so on, so that's what I did. I noticed later on in the evening that when Windows started it's first malware scan and also when I enabled File Versioning (or whatever it's called) that my HDD was on it's knees. It was thrashing away like buggery.
I've known for a long time that the HDD is the bottleneck in my system. When I built it 18 months ago it was a high end system but I couldn't afford SSDs and I didn't think they were mature enough to go with them (loads of money for not very much space) so I have 3 SATA drives in my system. 1 has OS X, 1 has Windows and temporarily I have 1 that has documents and is a general test bed / hive of villany.
So I'm thinking SSDs. Problem is, I have a Gigabyte X58 based motherboard. And they're known to have compatibility issues with SATA-III and SSDs due to the chipset used for SATA-III in them. There's not much I can do about that.
So would it still be worth me getting a SATA-II? Or maybe SATA-III, run it on the S2 ports assuming that one day soon there'll be another system upgrade in the works.
And for those of you that are rocking your SSDs, how do you go about the split? I don't have masses and masses of data but in my Windows drive I'm probably using about 300GB or so of a 640GB drive (that's basically OS and games). In OS X i'm probably using half of a 500GB drive.
SSDs of 128GB are starting to be affordable but even that isn't enough to just do a straight swap so how do you split it between OS and, well, other??? What do you put where etc. Or do you just raid up 5 SSDs and call it a day (yeah right, can't afford that!).
I went through a phase of trying to keep my games OS as free from clutter as possible, only installing games on it. That got a bit muddied, there are some other things on there but generally not too much but it means I have VMWare on there and I run a VM with all my development stuff on it. Given the upgrade for Windows 8 is only going to be £25 in download form I may abandon that and go to a physical drive for all that stuff. But that kind of brings further complication in!!
Something else I'm wondering is whether it's feasible to buy a 256GB SSD and partition it for two operating systems. But I think Windows and OS X handle stuff like block alignment and TRIM differently so I don't know if that would be possible? It does seem like to get a good working SSD based setup you need to know far more low level stuff that you've had to know for many, many years. Hence wanting to get some feedback...
So I upgraded to Windows 8 last night. And yes, I really do mean upgraded. I didn't do a fresh install as this is a gaming PC and games these days tend to come down the wire so a complete wipe and fresh install would have meant gigabytes upon gigabytes of downloads. That's the flip side to the instant gratification you get of buying a game and a couple of hours later you're immersed in playing it.
I learnt after my last accidental HDD wipe (yep, my fault!) that keeping all my save game folders for the various games on a folder in DropBox and using hard links to them so the games don't know they're not where they think they are is a great way to save my arse so there was no backup / restore required, just an in-situ upgrade.
SO, I have to say the upgrade went flawlessly. I learnt a long time ago to disconnect all drives other than the one you're installing to or you'll lose your custom bootloaders and so on, so that's what I did. I noticed later on in the evening that when Windows started it's first malware scan and also when I enabled File Versioning (or whatever it's called) that my HDD was on it's knees. It was thrashing away like buggery.
I've known for a long time that the HDD is the bottleneck in my system. When I built it 18 months ago it was a high end system but I couldn't afford SSDs and I didn't think they were mature enough to go with them (loads of money for not very much space) so I have 3 SATA drives in my system. 1 has OS X, 1 has Windows and temporarily I have 1 that has documents and is a general test bed / hive of villany.
So I'm thinking SSDs. Problem is, I have a Gigabyte X58 based motherboard. And they're known to have compatibility issues with SATA-III and SSDs due to the chipset used for SATA-III in them. There's not much I can do about that.
So would it still be worth me getting a SATA-II? Or maybe SATA-III, run it on the S2 ports assuming that one day soon there'll be another system upgrade in the works.
And for those of you that are rocking your SSDs, how do you go about the split? I don't have masses and masses of data but in my Windows drive I'm probably using about 300GB or so of a 640GB drive (that's basically OS and games). In OS X i'm probably using half of a 500GB drive.
SSDs of 128GB are starting to be affordable but even that isn't enough to just do a straight swap so how do you split it between OS and, well, other??? What do you put where etc. Or do you just raid up 5 SSDs and call it a day (yeah right, can't afford that!).
I went through a phase of trying to keep my games OS as free from clutter as possible, only installing games on it. That got a bit muddied, there are some other things on there but generally not too much but it means I have VMWare on there and I run a VM with all my development stuff on it. Given the upgrade for Windows 8 is only going to be £25 in download form I may abandon that and go to a physical drive for all that stuff. But that kind of brings further complication in!!
Something else I'm wondering is whether it's feasible to buy a 256GB SSD and partition it for two operating systems. But I think Windows and OS X handle stuff like block alignment and TRIM differently so I don't know if that would be possible? It does seem like to get a good working SSD based setup you need to know far more low level stuff that you've had to know for many, many years. Hence wanting to get some feedback...
rogram Files so may take a bit more persuasion.
