v150 wrote:
What kind of programs are we even talking about? How much do you put on your SSD?
And where would my games go? I don't want to put them on the boot-drive because constantly installing and deleting them would wear the SSD down.
This is your choice, the less you access your mechanical hdd the better noise wise, i personally like to install all my games on my SSDs, given that there is no gain on actual performance of the game, like frames per second, there are gains like in MMOs, where loading textures and different parts of the world is a usual task, there are other gains like faster reconnects, faster loading of screens etc.
On the wear, unless you are heavily writting, i dont think you will have an issue, there are lots of studies that people even writing 20gb a day, and the simulate 5 years of this routine and the ssds berely fail, installing and uninstalling games shouldnt even come close to this numbers, even if there are weekly patches, updates and so on.
Now on the editing, depending on what you are doing can wear down the ssd faster, i had a friend that wrote more than 200gb a day... and he did wear down ssds in months, but sizes were smaller, now you can have big ssds for more reasonable prices.
I still think the 250gb is the sweet spot atm, 120gb goes very fast, also the performance and controllers are maximized on most cases for 250/256gb, where 120/128gb are crippled on writing, not a big deal, but to me its worth the extra $, this again up to you.
Now on the mechanical, if you go into all your programas and games into the ssd, i would go with red/green caviar for pure storage, this is how im setup atm and i never hear my mechanical hdds, again up to you into what you will be doing with your mechancial hdd. Personally i would avoid blacks n blues, unless you really need to, reds/greens are very good drives for storage.
CA_Steve wrote:
- R4 case fans. Try them and see if you like them. I found them to be very quiet, but audible. I'm not sure the Asus Fan Expert will work with them - Abula? If it doesn't, then you have the 5V case controller setting (quiet, but audible).
Asus FanXpert2, should drop the Fractal R2 140s to around 400rpms on idle on CHA_FAN headers. I agree with steve, the fans are decent and not bad at all, but not the best fans around, test them see if they are good enough for you, and decide later if you want to upgrade them or not, if you decide to upgrade for a less noisy fan, consider Antec True Quiet 140, i just got a mine yesterday, and did some testing, really impressed with the sound caracteristics on it, specially with Asus Mobo, it idles at 200rpms, you do need to be a little careful as the fan barely pushes any air this low though, but its totally inaudible even at 3am where my home is very quiet.