Installing My First SSD

Hi,
I am installing my 256GB Crucial C300 SSD later today. I have heard that you should partition a section of it for only the operating system. (Windows 7 for me).

Is this true or will I see equal boot times just running one partition?

When I saw it I believe the purpose was so you didn't get slower and slower boot times as you wrote and then deleted stuff to the drive.

Also, should TRIM take care of anything automatically, or do I have to worry about anything like that?

Thanks

 

Here's what I would do:

Start Clean install

Choose custom installation, delete all partitions and create ONE new one for the entire size of the drive

Finish Windows installation

Run all Windows updates

Install latest Intel RST

Enjoy your SSD

(To check if performance is up to par you might want to run Crystal Disk Mark and post your results).

 

Nope. Just have a single partition and install your OS there.

Yes, trim will take care of everything.


--

 

It's not exactly what your talking about (as I think you're talking about over provisioning), but I created a 22GB partition (have 16GB of RAM - see sig) after creating the 215GB system partition. Once Windows was installed, initialized and formatted the 2nd partition and then moved Win 7's virtual memory pagefile to use only that partition.

Can't say it will help nor hinder performance, but I wanted to keep a clean partition which only had one file - pagefile.sys - so the OS could expand and contract without any other files getting in the way.

Boot times on my x7200 are just over 13 seconds.

 

16 GB RAM and 22 GB virtual memory. Are you shure you don`t want more just in case?

 

it's an SSD. it does not care where stuff is stored. it does not even KNOW your partitions. so no, the ssd does not bother at all where the pagefile is. nor does the os. it'll expand in junks, and those might be spread over the whole disk as needed (into big free space areas). and as you know, data spread over junks has no noticable performance difference on an ssd (hence no defragmentation needed).

fact is, you limit your pagefile to 22gb, instead of letting the system handle it how ever it want (maybe you'd one day need a 32gb pagefile? in your case, it'll crash before you're there. not that you'll ever need that much in a normal case, but as you have tons of ram and ssd and all, i don't know your needs. and i know that f.e. 3d rendering applications like 3dsmax or maya can have huuuge memory needs (100gb ram and more.. so an as big as possible pagefile is best)

 

On top of browser and email, I've been running 3 or 4 VMs, Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010, SQL Server and Oracle. The vmm's pagefile has never grown past 20GB. As mentioned, each user's requirements are different. 38GB has been more than enough for my needs. If things change, I'll just re-adjust the partition or worst case I can always remove the partition and go back to everything on one drive.

A single partition will work just fine. I was trying isolate a vmm flushing bug in Firefox, and seemed like letting NTFS handle the tracking of allocated blocks and free space blocks for just the single file might help in detection. Seems my FF freezes have disappeared in this configuration. It could be coincidence, but I'm sticking with this configuration for now.

In any case, as davepermen mentioned, how those blocks in NTFS get mapped into the NAND flash by the SSD [fw]/controller really doesn't matter. As far as the SSD is concerned it has its own mapping in order to spread writes across all NAND cells/blocks for wear-leveling reasons and should remain unaware of the partition.

 

I installed Windows on a new SSD and followed some tips to improve performance in this 4rum. But when I remove Intel driver AHCI controller and let Windows automatically install drivers, Intel RST service is not working anymore (always not running). So which one should I follow: install the latest Intel RST or let it be as the current?

 

I would install Intel RST.

 

Intel RST service depends on the Intel RST driver. For AHCI mode, the Intel RST service is not needed.