I’m looking for a decent ssd at around 500gb size for my PC.
Do I run operating system off that and games of the regular 1tb drive?
Looking at this…
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-169-SA&tool=3
Also, presumably I’ll do a full reinstall of the PC for this right?
IIRC when I was shopping, samsung weren’t that good. I bought a sandisk one and it’s going great a couple of years on.
what are you planning on putting on it that you need 500Gb for?
yes, having a large standard hard drive for data is the usual thing to do.
make sure you back it up regularly.
I got one of those Samsung EVO 512GB. Purchased not long ago and seems to work fine. Samsung’s quite good right now, especially the pro (vs evo) edition. Obviously pro is pricier.
There are amazon deals going on right now, you might be interested:
512GB Crucial MX 100
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-CT512MX100SSD1-512GB-Includes-Adapter/dp/B00KFAGCUM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417103949&sr=8-1&keywords=crucial+mx+100+512
The 256GB MX 100 is only 75 quid, there was a sale for £60 yesterday which might come back.
Reviews for both are pretty good and they’re cheap comparatively too: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8066/crucial-mx100-256gb-512gb-review/9
Depending on your usage, 256GB might be enough. I only use 256GB for Windows anyways. Run your most used games off the SSD so it loads fast. Anything huge, put it on the 1TB HDD.
It depends what you’re doing with it. Things you’re pulling off disk and into memory a lot you want to be pulling off the SSD. Generally this isn’t the OS (much of which gets into memory at the beginning and tries to stay there) and is instead stuff you’re working on or game textures or whatever.
If you want to have a willy-waving contest about how fast your PC is to boot (which seems to preoccupy about half of computer science these days) then you want your OS on the SSD.
If you’re swapping to disk a lot then it’s somewhat worth putting your swapfile on the SSD, but it’s much better to get more memory, since you’ve got a fairly limited number of writes on the SSD.[
Depends what you’re doing. You ought to be able to just plug it in and then use it to store the stuff you want speedy access to on it. I’d guess Windows wont like just being put on a new disk, though.
I think they’re all relatively equal nowadays quality-wise. I have an older generation Crucial M4 that I bought a few years back and I’ve never had any issues with it.
Recently bought 2 OCZ Vertex 4’s for my laptops and same thing - plug ‘n’ play and no glitches whatsoever.
Asked a friend of mine a second ago, who’s a bit more tech savvy than me, about what he thinks and he says Samsungs are good these days and actually sent me a link to the same one you chose. Amazon have them for 20 quid cheaper though: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-500GB-2-5-inch-Basic-Solid/dp/B00E3W19MO/.
As for running games off the same drive or not - it’s really your choice. If you buy a 500GB drive then I think you have more than enough space to accommodate the OS AND all your games. I have a 128GB SSD in my PC solely because I didn’t want to spend much money back then (prices were much higher) but wanted my OS to run fast, so I installed Windows on the SSD and have all my games on a normal HDD. It can get annoying sometimes when you lauch a game and have to wait 3-5 seconds for the drive to spin up but after that it usually works fine. Unless the game stops reading data from the drive while you play and then suddenly has to load something again. Then you have to wait till it spins up again.
I also have another 120GB SSD for Ubuntu to dual boot too, it might be the same OCZ.
£170 for a 500GB SSD drive is mighty tempting so I’d say get it, split it into partitions - one for your OS (I’m guessing you’re using Windows) and the rest for movies/music/games/etc. Size of the C: partition depends on what else you’ll be installing because bear in mind that all the applications will install on the C: drive by default too. I’d say 40-60GB should be your ballpark if you want a larger second partition. If you won’t have hundreds of games installed at the same time give Windows 100GB and leave the rest for games.
You don’t have to. There are applications that allow you to clone your existing drive onto the SSD, oftentimes even developed by the manufacturer. Clean install is always preferred over a copy though and generally doesn’t take too much time if you haven’t got tonnes of stuff installed.
Hope that helps 
P.S.
One word of advice - if you get one, I’d suggest you keep the data on the old drive for a while just in case. At least you’ll have it if your new SSD suddenly dies. Or just use “cloud” to save important files. OneDrive is quite generous I think with space, 15GB if I’m not mistaken.
I had the M4 and Kingston never had an issue.
Sorry in advance for this Cypher but STAY WELL CLEAR OF OCZ, they are by far the worst I’ve dealt with had to replace 2 (different clients and machines) as after a while they just degrade to such a shite level they become unusable even with updated firmware!
Single-datapoint anecdata I know, but I’ve had this OCZ one in my laptop for a couple of years now with no issues. We’ve gone through a few brands at work I think we’ve had trouble with most 
I suspect they’re still new and shiny enough that most are experimental. Some seem to have mental failure modes, too - Intels will notice they’re failing and prevent any access to any of the disk at next powerup apparently, which seems a little crazy…
Nice drive I use the 256 verson for work.
You can clone over you old hard disk (boot disk, clone old hard drive / swap in new ssd boot disk clone old disk image (image is what you have produced from the old drive) onto new disk.
You’d want to clear off all your old music and pron first otherwise it will take ages.
If you’ve got tons of crap on your old disk then just reinstall onto the ssd then you can plug in your old disk later on and use that as the data disc (ie programs and OS goes on SSD data/files goes on your old spinner)
Hahahaha brilliant
cool. I only have a couple high def games. tbh. I’m really enjoying command and conquer generals and heroes 3 WOG edition again 
proper oldskool hey?
I’ve got all my important data on a 16TB NAS which is backed up to an external 3TB drive. In addition to that the most important stuff is backed up in the cloud so I wouldn’t care if all my SSDs died tomorrow. They only hold the OS so no big loss
Yeah, apparently Kingston HyperX are the same, but only on the consumer-grade disks, and what actually happens is that when the wear indicator hits 0 it goes ro, and then it kills itself on next powercycle. So if you’ve got one and it goes ro, the usual blunt fix might actually make it worse. Enterprise disks, apparently, just remain ro however many times you cycle the power.
If I remember correctly, the old (and I mean really old) SSDs used to have 5-6000 write cycles so I would assume it’d take a long time for your average consumer to fill it up with new data several thousand times. Modern ones don’t have such low tolerances any more by the looks of it.
http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1rqegh/are_ssd_write_limits_still_a_major_concern/
I think I read the other day about potential (maybe minor, and I may be wrong) problems with Samsung on The Register or Toms Hardware. Anyway, the Crucial 512GB SSD I got a few months ago has been great.
However, one thing is I gather the Samsung comes with software to migrate your OS from your old drive to new and make it boot etc.
The Crucial drive doesn’t come with software, so you need 3rd party software to do it. There are free tools, but none of them worked for me - I think Windows 8.x is particularly tricky to migrate. In the end I think I bought this - http://www.paragon-software.com/technologies/components/migrate-OS-to-SSD/ - which did the job easily.
If you really need more than 512GB of space, then yes use your old HD as a 2nd drive for files or archive/backup etc. Keep anything “live” on your SSD if you can.
I spent a long term reviewing SSD reviews and forums before I finally took the plunge. As some have said OCZ were having failure fates in excess of 150% which is why they went bankrupt and were taken over by Toshiba.
I wasn’t interested in out right speed, I wanted reliability, and longevity. In the end I went for a 256 Samsung 840 EVO which can be had for a very tidy price.
Of all the major players in the SSD market, Samsung are only ones that have not have the serious firmware issues the others have had, and that includes the mighty Intel.
Jaime, there’s a cheap second hand one going here if you’re interested: https://www.avforums.com/threads/samsung-ssd-840-evo-500gb.1922673/
And Cypher speaks truth, back up your important data. Your drive, whether HDD or SSD, will fail. SSDs have good warranty (3years for EVO and 5 for PRO) now so they will replace drives when they fail. You just need to make sure your data is backed up.
And preferably off site as we.
Agree with Kevsta, just done a quick google and that one is £166 on Dabs bargain
CHeers Blu! I’ve sent the guy a pm and am awaiting the reply now
gonna pick up a 500gb samsung for £140 now
unused but opened. 4 months old. with receipt
