40gb ssd

I'm thinking about buying a 40gb ssd and having windows 7 boot off of it and have programs and other stuff run off a regular hd. Is 40gb enough and will I encounter problems in the future if win7 files increase in size over time ( or will they?)

 

40GB is plenty for Windows and a few apps. The big thing you want to think about is what apps are you going to be running, and how easily will they install to an external drive, and how willing you will be to pull out the external drive every time you want to run them. Look at how much disk space everything except your Program Files/Program Files (x86) folders are using, and then add in the space used by the programs you will want on-disk, and if that's less than about 30GB (like any drive, you don't want to stuff an SSD to the gills), you should be fine.

You will save 4GB of space (or whatever your RAM size is) by being able to disable the hibernation on the system. An SSD should restart as fast or faster than hibernate/resume, and it's a good idea to not constantly write large blocks of data like that anyway with a SSD.

 

I have a 64GB SSD for Windows 7, and still have tons of space. A 40 GB would work (Windows 7+Office 2007 full install+lots of smaller programs). Turning off hibernation and turning off (or at least reducing space used by) system restore will free up a lot of space.

 

I have 30GB (29,8 usable) SSD in my Lenovo/thinkpad and I have 9 GB left. I have office 2009, uTorrent, Cryptload, KIS 2010, Winamp, Windows live Mail, MSN and a some apps for my windows mobile phone. AND about 100MB with documents. Running Windows Vista SP2 Fully updated.

 

I hate to hijack the thread, but I know with hard drives, you should leave like 15% space or more for optimal performance (and for defrag). Is this true on an ssd as well, or can you fill it up completely just fine?

 

You don't need to defrag an SSD for one. Though you shouldn't fill up the disk entirely either because things are still written to it like system logs and by filling it up you are going to cause bad things to happen.

 

It's fine, and I'd run most programs off of the SSD too. Typical desktop apps don't take up much space. If you have a few programs that consume gobs of space, then put just those programs on the hard disk. Document files are small too and you can put those on the SSD which is less likely to fail anyway. So the hard disk I'd just use for media files and storage-space-consuming games.

 

Same is true on SSDs. They do an automatic "defrag" as they write and delete things, so you don't have to do it with software (windows shouldn't even allow you to do it), but if you fill up the drive, it will still not have good contiguous spaces to put files so it will kill the performance.

I wouldn't aim for any less than 15% free space on an SSD.

 

It's not quite the same. SSDs have near-zero seek times, so read performance doesn't suffer nearly as much from fragmentation. However, write performance may still suffer if it has to shuffle things around a lot.

That's a larger margin than I'd leave... but I'd be interested to see if someone did any tests to measure performance degradation with near-full SSDs. I'd be willing to tolerate some minor performance degradation, since SSD capacity is expensive and performance is so much faster than a hard drive, even if write speeds should fall slightly below the maximum.

 

Oh ok thanks Pitabred, you answered my question nicely. ^_^

 

Read performance still suffers, because the controller will have to read from multiple chips instead of one. Just look at the difference between the 4k read and the 512k read on reviews like this. 21MB/s vs. 165MB/s. That is HUGE, and is a result of the relative fragmentation.

Again, looking at the specs I posted above, I would treat an SSD much like a spinning disk. Fragmentation affects them both. If it has to pull partial blocks from multiple chips an SSD will slow down, just like a spinning disk will slow if it has to pull data from multiple sectors.

 

@wontons: if you dont use the DVD drive that much you could put your 250GB HD in there. see SSD in DVD bay
SSD for main os stuff and HD for other is good setup.
i have my DVD in its own caddy (cheap from ebay) and i really hardly ever use it. i do not have an SSD, (still thinking about it) but the extra space i have with 2 drives is great. see my sig