Just installed a 40gb ssd into my 8150

Hi guys I just bought a ssd intel 40gb one. I installed windows and I only have 14gb left. not much room for games.

I have a external harddrive enclosure and two 500gb hard drives but im pretty sure its usb 2.0.

the question is.... Can I game using the external drive? and was it smart to install a ssd as a boot drive?

 

Of course. That's what you're supposed to do.

You can, but loading times might be longer.

 

I wouldn't use the externals over USB for installing games. They'll be dead slow in comparison to an internal drive. I'd recommend looking into buying a caddy for the optical bay and installing one of your 500GB drives there. You can move the optical drive to an external enclosure (which probably will get much less use than a disk drive).

If you want to free up some space on the Windows C: drive, consider disabling hibernate (and removing the hiberfile) and shrinking or turning off the page file (which isn't quite as useful as it used to be, when you have lots of RAM).

EDIT: And yes, using the SSD as the boot drive is the best option. Doing anything else will negate most of its usefulness.

 

And also regularly using CCleaner to get rid of junk files and Internet caches/temp files could also help maintain the limited size of your OS.

The rest is as Malibal put it; disable hibernate, disable page file(controversial, but it does reduce OS size), and minimize System Restore(I leave it at 1%, enough for a few restore points.)

 

Go disable your Page File in windows. This should clear up a few gigs. Of course certain programs wont run, but this is rare.

 

What is the Page File and what does it do?

 

What is the Page File for anyway? - Ask the Performance Team - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Get this :

It's from the article..

 

Windows typically will set your page file to the amount of RAM you have installed. I see you have 8GB so 20% of your SSD has been allocated to that. I turned mine to 0 and have had no problems doing so. Since you have alot of RAM you should also be fine.

All the other steps Malibal#2 mentioned are all good ideas as well. A program that does almost all of that for you is SSD Tweaker, try that.

 

Turning if off completely may also limit your machine from saving crash dumps in the case of a BSOD though. I also think the page file defaults to 1.5x the amount of RAM, not just equal to it. That's why on machines with 8GB or 16GB of RAM it can be ugly.

I keep a minimal page file of 10% so that Windows doesn't throw any hiccups and because I have some older games that (interestingly enough) won't run if the page file is 0.

 

Looks like the official amount preset by Windows is equal to amount of RAM +300MB, either way can be alot of space lost on an SSD

 

MALIBAL #2s suggestion is perfect. 10% is a nice compromise.

Warhammer 40k Retribution wont run w/o a Page File. (Happened to me )

If you need the crash dump reports you can always go and re-enable the Page File.

As with disabling any feature in Windows it's a risk that most enthusiast are willing to take. (Like disabling Pre-fetch and Cache writing) It's a risk, but a minor one.

 

Oh, one other suggestion:

Go turn off system restore. It's completely useless anyway, and it takes up alot of space.

 

I have the ssd out of my computer. it has windows 7 and all the drivers installed ect. all i have to do is plop it back in. but IMHO I didnt notice a speed increase, I only noticed boot times were increased and how often do you need to reboot.