HDD/SSD Possibility

[Galant]

Chuck a post up on the Scan forum and see what they say, probably easier to get everything from one place even if it costs a little bit more.
If you really get stuck I would be happy to order bits and ship them to you.

Post up. They actually have an almost ideal system. The website looks like no shipping outside the UK but I've asked in case they're flexible.

Thanks Flibb!

Thanks also Saracen, Goobley, Marcvs, Stylin, and AETAaAs.

[DanceswithUnix]

Perhaps you are long past the initial question by now, but one question I have is how old you spare hard drives are?

Consumer drives seem to be designed as a consumable, and once out of warranty I would be careful where I use one given how much of a pain it is trying to rebuild a machine from a failed drive.

I also wouldn't want a 60GB SSD. This machine has a 250GB SSD, sounds like I have a similar usage profile to you in that I don't game that much. Still, there are some games on there and so far I haven't had to do any picking and choosing of what goes and stays as you can fit a fair bit into 250GB.

[scaryjim]

A couple of points:

1) if someone is saying the PSU is 300W, 350W peak, I'd be fairly happy with that - you rarely get a cheapo PSU rated that low, which means the rating is probably more or less accurate. It's more likely to be a decent OEM with a proper rating (the one thing I will say is that it's unlikely to have any PCIe power connectors, but there's plenty of decent performance dGPUs now that don't need them.

2) is a hybrid drive an option? They start at about £55, so I guess around £20 more than a 1TB spinning rust, and provide many of the performance advantages of an SSD combined with the storage capacity of conventional HDDs. It's a reasomnable compromise if you can get the spec with one in.

I have to say that between my 4GB RAM Win 7 laptop with an SSD and my 8GB RAM Win 8 laptop with a 1TB HDD, I've noticed very little difference in responsiveness. I'm guessing that's mostly down to good caching algorithms in Win 8 preloading a lot of commonly used files. So if you're speccing with 8GB and Win 8, you might find that not having an SSD doesn't massively impair your experience