New System - Few Queries

[Oreth]

Ok well i finally got a new system. Right before i starting purchasing some parts a graphic design company went bust out near where i work. They had this 3 month old machine going cheap and i jumped at it.

Firstly let me say this, the 3 sexiest letters in the english language are SSD!

Setup

Case - Antec P180

MOBO - EVGA X58 SLI LE

CPU - Intel Core i7-920 - 2.66 GHz - 8 MB L3 Cache - LGA 1366 Socket

GFX - SAPPHIRE TECHNOLOGY Radeon Toxic HD 5850 - 1 GB GDDR5

PSU - Cooler Master Silent Pro M700 700W PC Power Supply

RAM - 6GB DDR3 triple channel - OCZ Gold Low-Voltage Triple Channel 3 x 2 GB DDR3-1600 PC3-12800 CL8 PC Memory

HDD1 - Intel X25-M MLC 2.5 Solid State Disk (SSD) - 80 GB - SATA-300

HDD2 - Samsung SpinPoint F3 Desktop Class HD103SJ Hard Drive - 3.5"- 1 TB - 32 MB - 7200 rpm - SATA-300

Cooling (Case) - 1 x Noctua 120mm Silent fans

Cooling (CPU) - Noctua CPU Cooler

DVD - Sony Nec Optiarc DVD-RW

Keyboard - Logitech Illuminated Keyboard

Mouse - Logitech MX Revolution

Anyways getting down to it, im kind of new to SSD but the one thing the guy told me was to get the SSD Toolbox from Intel to manage the SSD drive and not to use the defrag tools from within Windows 7, Is this the best thing to do?

In relation to installation of applications should i put the likes of Avast / MSE / Malwarebytes etc on the SSD? Keep maybe my favourite game and the likes of Photoshop on there but the rest on the extra drive? Is there a certain amount of space i should keep free on it?

Im sure more queries will crop up. Thanks alot for the help.

[Evanos]

Some elements of that system are strikingly similar to my own. I have a P182 (same thing as P180 except gunmetal black), i7-930 (not much different from your 920), an x58 mobo, and the same SSD.

What I do personally is have my most commonly used programs (os install, overclocking/temp monitoring/etc software, the current game I'm playing a lot, chrome/firefox, etc)on the SSD and I let the intel software basically take care of the drive for me. I keep other large software and media on my RAID. Depending on how you have your system setup you will want to keep at least some space free on the SSD. A hard drive usually needs a minimum of 10% to be healthy and I recall seeing a test where 5% is roughly the minimum you want to go for a SSD. If you have your pagefile on the SSD you'll also want to keep some extra room free for that.

If you are planning on overclocking your CPU much a good way to drop temp with that case is to pull out the middle bay holder and get a good push/pull going through the system. If you want some pictures of that I can show you what I did (I even cut a hole in the front of my flap-open door and one on the side to put a fan there).

Ok well i finally got a new system. Right before i starting purchasing some parts a graphic design company went bust out near where i work. They had this 3 month old machine going cheap and i jumped at it.

Firstly let me say this, the 3 sexiest letters in the english language are SSD!

Setup

Case - Antec P180

MOBO - EVGA X58 SLI LE

CPU - Intel Core i7-920 - 2.66 GHz - 8 MB L3 Cache - LGA 1366 Socket

GFX - SAPPHIRE TECHNOLOGY Radeon Toxic HD 5850 - 1 GB GDDR5

PSU - Cooler Master Silent Pro M700 700W PC Power Supply

RAM - 6GB DDR3 triple channel - OCZ Gold Low-Voltage Triple Channel 3 x 2 GB DDR3-1600 PC3-12800 CL8 PC Memory

HDD1 - Intel X25-M MLC 2.5 Solid State Disk (SSD) - 80 GB - SATA-300

HDD2 - Samsung SpinPoint F3 Desktop Class HD103SJ Hard Drive - 3.5"- 1 TB - 32 MB - 7200 rpm - SATA-300

Cooling (Case) - 1 x Noctua 120mm Silent fans

Cooling (CPU) - Noctua CPU Cooler

DVD - Sony Nec Optiarc DVD-RW

Keyboard - Logitech Illuminated Keyboard

Mouse - Logitech MX Revolution

Anyways getting down to it, im kind of new to SSD but the one thing the guy told me was to get the SSD Toolbox from Intel to manage the SSD drive and not to use the defrag tools from within Windows 7, Is this the best thing to do?

In relation to installation of applications should i put the likes of Avast / MSE / Malwarebytes etc on the SSD? Keep maybe my favourite game and the likes of Photoshop on there but the rest on the extra drive? Is there a certain amount of space i should keep free on it?

Im sure more queries will crop up. Thanks alot for the help.