[swizzle90]

I just received 2 x Corsair Force Series GT CSSD-F60GBGT-BK 2.5" 60GB SATA III Internal SSDs. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6820233193) And I was wondering what steps I should take and/or advice that people have before installing.

I want to either:
A: Install both drives and run Ubuntu on one and Windows 7 on the other.
or
B: Install one drive with Ubuntu and run Windows 7 in a VM, and use the other SSD in my laptop.

I would prefer option A because I would like to have enough space on the Windows drive to install Skyrim and maybe a couple other things. Most of my time is spent in Ubuntu but all of my media management i.e..fanart, posters, etc. are done in Windows and I will most likely have XBMC setup in both OSs.

My current hardware setup is (in case anything could affect setting up the SSDs):
MoBo: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+ AMD 990FX with UEFI BIOS (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6813131736)
Ram: G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6820231426)
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor HDZ955FBGMBOX (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6819103808)

If anybody could help out that would be awesome.

[Atomic Zombie]

SSD's act the exact same way as HDD's. there are thousands of Dual booting tutorials on the intwewebs.

[swizzle90]

@atomic Zombie I know that there are plenty of tutorials around the web for dual booting SSDs. I was just wondering if anybody had advice for setting up for use with XBMC since the computers main function is an HTPC.

[CpTHOOK]

Well... First you will want to update your SSD to the latest firmware. Info on that should be on the manufacture webpage.. The you can start here..

After you get set-up, why don't you share with us the performance difference you notice afterward

If you are using as a dedicated HTPC you should add XBMC to your start-up so you will boot directly into it!

Good Luck!

[swizzle90]

Thanks CpTHOOK, will do. I already read that post, just figured I'd see if anybody had any other advice.

[jackh]

Well, all I can say is based on my first and only SSD running Ubuntu (Linux Mint really) and XBMC on top as my dedicated Media Center, so my recommendations are only for Linux:
-I did not check your new SSD drives, but I assume they support TRIM (all new ones do nowadays). So make sure to enable TRIM in your /etc/fstab with the "discard" option on all partitions on the SSD.
-Another option in your /etc/fstab on all partitions on the SSD should be "noatime", to avoid writing the access time each time you read or write a file. Yes, it sounds stupid and you may have to reread the previous sentence, but it's correct.

For economy, I'd suggest installing both OSes on the same drive in a dual-boot fashion. This is doable very easily from Ubuntu with GRUB (I have my main computer setup like this on a HDD). BUT honestly I do not know if the amount of space on a single SSD will be enough, particularly given the hungry demands of Win7.

In any case the objective should be to install the OSes and some apps on the SSD, and anything else that requires large storage or continuous write operations on a traditional HDD.

All of the above aims at extending the usable life of the SSDs. I may be missing more good things to do, but I think it's not too bad for this linux n00b. Having said that, I must wait at least a couple of years to see if it all worked as expected!

[swizzle90]

Thanks jackh, after reading some other posts I already planned on turning TRIM on and "atime" off. The main question that I have is if I should dual boot on one drive or use both drives, I have 11.5TB that contains my movies, tv shows, music, etc... and an additional 250GB HDD for my downloads until they get sorted so the SSDs will only be used for OSs and programs. My big worry about dual booting on one drive is that I use 64bit and I know Windows takes up more space for the 64bit OSs and I would like to have enough space for one or two games along with whatever software I may need i.e. Photoshop or After Effects.
If I had gone with a 120GB SSD I would feel more comfortable dual booting on it, I just wasn't sure if there was anything I should worry about using 2 separate SSDs in dual boot or not. Thanks again.

[Driver 944]

As a experiment for a friend who wanted to try Linux Mint on a system that had Win7 64 on a SSD, but didn’t want to chance Linux writing anything from Grub to a perfectly working system.

Dual boot, 2 drives, drive 1 Win7, drive 2 Linux Mint.
Disconnect Win7 drive,
Install Mint to 2nd drive.
Connect Win7 drive.
Set Bios to boot Linux drive and Grub will give you the option to boot from Linux or Win7.

The only problem we encountered was the clock showing wrong time in Win7. To fix that, in Linux make the following change – /etc/default/rcS - UTC=no
Now he is free to tinker with Linux, change to a different version, and if he corrupts the files or breaks anything, he won’t have to deal with Win7 not working or booting. Call it a Linux Noobie insurance policy.

Sounds like you know what you want, just offering a different take on a dual boot from a trial and error point of view.

[bcboncs]

Hi, welcome.

I cannot take credit for this, but I did bookmark it for any future occurrences that I may have with an SSD. See: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=95334

[teeedubb]

I have xbmc/minimal-ubuntu11.10 + win7 x64 installed onto a 60 gb ssd, from memory its 15gb for xbmc and the rest for windows. I guess I could shrink the xbmc partition but my windows install is very light weight as I only use it for emulators and pc games which are mostly installed onto a separate hdd. In windows I disabled the hibernation file as its the same size as whatever amount of ram is installed + in linux I have no swap partition.

It all depends on how much you ant to install in both ubuntu and windows and how the machines are used... my setup is a htpc where very little is changed or installed.. I have a similar setup on my desktop with a 120gb ssd, 60gb each for ubuntu and windows with a 500gb hdd for games+movies+music. I only really install aplications like office/firefox/antivirus etc to the ssd's.

EDIT Out of curiosity i just checked how much of each partition is being used:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use%
xbmc 16G 9.6G 5.3G 65%
windows 40G 18G 23G 45%