Dual Boot or use SSD for storage?

[neworldman]

I have two SSD drives... One is a Intel 120 gb with W7 Ultimate installed I use for a boot drive.. I also have two 2tb internal SATA drives I use for storage... I bought another SSD drive for cheap on the Black Friday sale $40 for 64 gb Crucial sata III... I downloaded the latest firmware for it and formated it to NTFS.. I wanted to try a dual boot with it and run a version of XP 32 bit or 64 bit not sure... So I got a XP version 32 bit that I had to try and installed it on my 64 gb ssd... So I decided to go back to my W7 SSD. When i did a reboot and hit F11 for boot menu and selected my Intel W7 drive I got a Windows root>\system\hal.dll error.. Said it was missing... So I put my W7 CD in and repaired it... All good... But now I am sour on trying the dual boot thing... Did I get the errors because I didn't do THIS

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html

.... Or should I just use the other SSD to run my games and other applications and use it like a external storage drive? I would still like to try the dual boot... What is the correct way to do this? Thanks

[fritzi93]

If your details are correct, you have 16 GB RAM installed. Why not run a VM (virtual machine)? Install the extra OS in the VM on the extra SSD and assign it a few gigs of RAM. The SSD will greatly help the notoriously slow boot-up of a VM install.

If you have the VM install the OS to a single folder, it has the advantage of being, hmm, "disposable". I use VMWare, so the following may not apply universally: Copy the folder to another hard drive once it's all set up. If anything stuffs up in the VM install, delete the folder and copy the backup folder to the original location. It's even easier than restoring a "normal" OS from an image. I've gone to getting on the internet only within the VM, and trying out new programs there also to test them.

Good luck.

[edDV]

So you only play games?

I rarely reboot so see no need to run OS in SSD.

I have an SSD configured as an additional drive for editing SD uncompressed.

[jman98]

I'm not a big fan of dual booting. I strongly agree with fritzi93's post. Using a virtual machine is in almost all cases a better idea than dual booting. Note that XP does not support TRIM because XP was written before there were SSDs, so that's a pretty strong argument against using XP on an SSD.

[neworldman]

Thanks for the info.... I decided to use the other SSD for storage and install games and my video editing software with it.. When I did have Xp on the SSd it seam to be slower then my W7 Ultimate... Maybe it was the TRIM stuff... I am very happy with W7 and the way it runs now.... Thanks