Samsung 64gb SSD partition formatted?

Okay so I bought a 64 gb Samsung SSD a while back and it had 53 GB available for use and 6.50GB unusable.

Under Computer Managerment> Disk Management I formatted the 6.50 gb partition and now use it to store a 6GB Paging file.

Was this a bad idea?

 

Good/bad - hard to tell.

Do you have at least some free space left on the main partition? Then it should be fine.

 

I do, on both partitions. The 6.50 gb partition used to be black in disk manager. Now it's blue and I can't get it back to the way it was before. But if it's not a problem, then that extra space is useful.

 

I would be more paranoid than you:

I would be doing a clean install of my O/S (either Win7 or Win8) and selecting the partitions and deleting them and then creating them again.

Why? Because from what I understand: if a partition is already on a drive; then Windows cannot properly change the initial offset (to make the drive into an 'aligned' state).

Of course, you can always check if the drive is aligned (with AS SSD for example) now - but I would still be re-installing with a single partition (and some space left as 'unallocated' - just as it was before).

 

Could nonalignment be the cause of Black Screens during gaming? I have been crashing a lot lately while playing games like Dota 2 or Skyrim and I ruled out Gpu Cpu temps and clocks.

 

Definitely.

No need to create partitions for paging file on SSD. Partitions on SSD are not physical so no matter if it is on separate or on 1.

Unallocated space was for over-provisioning. Better speed, access, wear-leveling etc.

 

No idea if black screens could be from a non-aligned SSD (though I could see how it might be possible).

Do you frequently experience pauses/stutters from your system? It could be the SSD trying to do it's GC routines and simply ignoring the O/S for a little too long (and hence; the black screens).

 

No, system response and stability while outside of gaming is insanely fast and responsive. Windows takes 8 seconds to boot, firefox starts up and loades pages instantly and I can do explorer tasks much, much faster than on my old 5400rpm hdd. It's only when I'm gaming that I get black screen instability problems. I am thinking that it might be my Power Brick that is getting old and is unstable in voltage output, as I tried gaming on battery last night and never black screened.