Windows 7 queries

OK I'm upgrading to W7. It comes out this week. I remember posing the question about whether or not to upgrade to Vista or spend the money on a hardware upgrade a couple of years ago. I opted for the hardware upgrade which I finished this year(Sadly, just before the new Icore chips came out) but I have a good rig none the less.
Intel Core2Quad Q9550
Asus Maximus II Formula MoBo
4gb ddr2 RAM
Dual HD4870 1gb cards in crossfire

So the rig can handle it. But I have some questions.
1st) Can't do an upgrade from XP to W7. Bummer. I need to either back up scads of files from years of XP usage, then format the drive and do a fresh install, or,
Purchse new hard drive and migrate the personal stuff over.If I do decide to pop out the cash for a new hard drive,should I:
2.) Go for a speedy 10,000 rpm raptor like drive?, or maybe a fat 2 TB 7200rpm drive?, or would now be the time to invest in a sleek but expensive SSD?. I read somewhere that W7 was optimized for SSD storage,(but I could be remembering that incorrectly).If an SSD is the choice, what about my existing hard drives. Can windows handle both types at the same time?
Your opinions are appreciated, I just wish I knew more about these things.

I was looking into ssd for my recent build and determined it is not quite "there" yet, especially in the price-per-Mb dept. I was mostly intrigued by the multitrack-access usage of the speed, but most pro's are sticking with the 10k or 7.2k drives. idk if you visit here but these guys know their stuff:

http://nuendo.com/phpbb2/viewforum.php?f=7&sid=14e864b7d32e03d5eab7e26f38258f5d

the sister site for Cubase is good too but has more nooby fluff in it.

As for migrating, I'm sure you could just slave your drives and access your files that way? I've been doing that as I need to with one of these:

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=24153&vpn=KF-1000-BK&manufacture=Kingwin

I've left so much shit behind and not missed it really. Sure speeds up the defrags.

Looks like a killer mobo tho

I can attest for those new Velociraptors from Western Digital. From someone who's been using 7200 rpm drives most of my life, these vraptors are plenty fast enough for me. And, affordable. I bought their 300GB one in early August, and use it as my OS install drive and for popular programs. Really speeds things up nicely. It cost me $218 and that AFAIK is their max disk space (300GB). I don't think they have any larger volume ones. It may not be an SSD, but between using 7200 rpm drives (which I still save all my files on my 7200 rpm drives) It's super fast. For the heck of it, I put all my Steam account games on my Vraptor, and load times for L4D, TF2 and EP2 and all the others are within 5-10-15 seconds for any of those maps. I'm always in the server first on map changes (of course the 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM helps) -And connection speed.

My Opinion: The Vraptor is noticeably faster for a much cheaper price, And you get much more space.

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

I ditched my raptor for a Crucial 128GB SSD and it totally smokes the old mechanical unit (albeit my WD1500ADFD would be marginally slower than the newer 2.5" units).

Anything with the Indilinx barefoot controller is prettymuch the best choice - this is the Corsair X series, Crucial M series, Patriot Torx, OCZ Vertex (althought he company is execrable) etc. They are nearly as fast as the Intel drives but far cheaper... although go for the 160Gb Intel G2 if you have money to burn. The Barefoot resolves all the of stuttering and write issues of the first wave of non-Intel controllers.

Run a mile from the original Indilinx controller, any Samsung drives (such as the Corsair P series) or anything with Jmicron on it.

The main things W7 does for SSDs is that it correctly aligns the partitions (as does Vista... although nothing stopping you using a correctly aligned SSD formatted using W7/Vista for an XP install), supports TRIM (not so important for the Intel or Indlinx Barefoot drives which lose little performance if you aren't running it. Bear in mind you'll need AHCI enabled for TRIM too), and disables a bunch of uneeded stuff like search indexing, superfetch and defrag services.

Well I just finished the upgrade. I know it sounds crazy, but I opted for 32bit install on a 1TB 7200rpm hitachi drive. My reasons being 1=price. I just could'nt wrap my head around the SSD pricing. 300.00 for 128 gb?. Also, there just is'nt a ton of stuff out there yet which specifically caters to the 64bit OS. I will upgrade to 64bit windows when I go to the Icore upgrade(probably in a year or so).
With the money I saved, I got a Silverstone 1000watt power supply, and a Cooler Master HAF932 case.I don't know if it's accurate, but the AI suite (the monitoring software which comes with the board)has my system idling at 15c for the CPU and 27c for the system. If there is a more accurate monitoring software out there for free I'd like to know, but if those temps are even close to accurate than I think I made the right case choice.
Now I spend my days optimizing, driver hunting and re-downloading all my steam stuff!. The worst thing I think about windows 7 is that a couple of big, and originally expensive programs just won't load up or act right. Namely Adobe products. I will have to spend money to get my Acrobat Professional, and my Audition sound software going good. Otherwise, it's been a relatively hassle free install. I really like W7 so far. I am also looking around the web for tips and tuts. Wanna learn all I can about it.

the 64 bit os in itself is much smoother to work in, not even looking at the applications it runs.

But let me tell you, 10k rpm, 64bit, its all fancy stuff. you notice a difference but its not needed for a functioning pc.

My system is about hte same temperature as yours. which is really nice and stable.

I've had tons of problems with Audio equipment and programm in windows 7, and i also have some troubles with adobe programms (which i thankfully barely use).

I'm really happy with windows 7 over windows vista, but some settings are really cookey, like if you dont have a recording device hooked up, it wont automatically decide your soundcard (digital mix) is also a recording device, you need to turn it on manually.

stuff like that

Also im happy with games support, Duke 3d, deus Ex, Diablo 1, hunter hunted, all games i couldn't even get working on windows XP. work perfectly on windows 7.

I will also add that the Windows Media Center in 7 is very sleek. The improvements over the Vista version are many. I bought a windows 7 dummy book, and I'll be studying it more now for sure. As for me, so far,I personally haven't been this pleased with a new Windows OS since XP after its first service pack. Just my 2 cents so far!.

Junkyard God said:
Also im happy with games support, Duke 3d, deus Ex, Diablo 1, hunter hunted, all games i couldn't even get working on windows XP. work perfectly on windows 7.

Duke 3D, Deus Ex and Diablo 1 all worked fine for me on XP.

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Aaron's Stuff

i never got em working on xp hehe, always had trouble with soudn and graphics

got all of my audio stuff working again now too with some updated drivers, the first realtek win 7 drivers didnt have a stereo mix channel -_-