Optimal way to use an SSD ?

Ash0787

Ash0787

Ash0787

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I've been using a 512gb ssd for about 3 years now, I like the speed increase that they give for general usage, but I have found that the size gets full quite easily and sometimes it is not easy to tell why

I do have some games installed to the ssd maybe 5 ? but I forget which ones

This makes me think, say if you had a super fast drive like the intel 750,
would it be better to use it as a secondary drive and only install games to it ? that way you could easily see what is on there and keep it clean,
but the downside would be that you then cant use it as your operating system drive and therefore lose some speed of the computer in general

Any ideas ? I heard Linus ( tech tips ) mention that it is possible to move a single game folder onto the SSD in Steam when you want to play it and then swap a different one so you only have one
 
the size gets full quite easily and sometimes it is not easy to tell why


I do have some games installed to the ssd maybe 5 ? but I forget which ones
Click to expand...

I think your problem might be faulty memory ;) How do you all fill 500GB with five games? Is Fallout 4 not 35GB? That is a lot of games i personally plan on moving to a 400GB 750 from my 256GB M4 and i think it will be enough.

OS (20GB) + Steam games 35GB on average spread over 400GB is a lot of active games. I normally run one active SP and the rest are my MP of which i have 8 or so.
 
Not quite sure what you're doing wrong, but I have a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo and have no problems with space. I've managed to install Win 10, MS Office, several other small software packages like paint.net, malwarebytes, AV etc etc and also the following games;



This still leaves me 111GB free!

Admittedly I do have a couple of 1TB mech hard drives in RAID 1 for storing photos, videos, music and other documents. I also use quite a bit of cloud storage.
 
Not just games on the C drive but applications,
any data that I dont want to dissapear from mechanical hard drive failure

downloads folder is like 100GB lots of zipped files, images, youtube videos, drivers, demo programs e.g. UE4

Skyrim saves folder is 6GB, got 1000s of images on the desktop,
some videos saved in documents from when I used to edit montage type movies ( I believe it was faster to render to the ssd )

on C:/ random folders, old files that have come from other computers
like screenshots from 2005, programming code, couple of games that are not installed through steam e.g. League

Any data thats been written by programs e.g. firefox cache, history etc
 
I use TreeSize Free to figure out where space is being taken up. On top of that, make sure you use Windows' built-in Disk Cleanup tool because that'll allow you to get rid of old Windows files, e.g. pre-service pack or pre-update files, which often take a lot of space. Another thing that people often overlook is System Restore/Volume Shadow Copy. This can take up to something like 20% of your drive space by default - it can be turned down significantly to free up space.
 
Ash0787 said:
Not just games on the C drive but applications,
any data that I dont want to dissapear from mechanical hard drive failure

downloads folder is like 100GB lots of zipped files, images, youtube videos, drivers, demo programs e.g. UE4

Skyrim saves folder is 6GB, got 1000s of images on the desktop,
some videos saved in documents from when I used to edit montage type movies ( I believe it was faster to render to the ssd )

on C:/ random folders, old files that have come from other computers
like screenshots from 2005, programming code, couple of games that are not installed through steam e.g. League

Any data thats been written by programs e.g. firefox cache, history etc
Click to expand...

Personally I use my SSD's for most used apps/OS and one for games.

My "files" are on mechanical drives as I dont access those a lot.

All that stuff above should be elsewhere, imo. :)

As mention above though, Treesize will tell you where the storage is being used.
 
Install Treesize Free, this will quickly tell you where all of your space has gone.

Good tools for freeing up space..

CCleaner Slim (personally, I avoid the registry cleaner side)
Disk Cleanup (this is part of Windows)
 
Do you think it might be worth partitioning in future to make it so the primary
drive is relatively small which would remove the temptation to store lots of stuff on there and foster better organization ? the other half of the drive could be like page file / video editing and then use a different physical drive for games ?


What about if I download a patch or mod ? should I download it to an SSD and then unrar it there and then move it away to a mechanical drive after and delete the archive ? if its a mod then I might want it to be loaded from an SSD at runtime though
 
I partition into a small OS one (40GB) and a 2nd for data/games. Then I can easily backup the OS one via Macrium. Easy to restore if I want to test software/upgrades or get a problem.
 
Windows 10 has storage breakdown built in, go into System > Storage and have a browse around, you can drill down what is consuming space.

It might be wise to download mods and large files to one drive, then unpack to the destination as this would make things a bit more efficient - By how much depends on your SSD and HDD combo. Personally I just download and unpack to the desktop (Intel SSD) and then do whatever. All software/games are on the OS SSD so things are simple. No issues this way.

My previous Samsung 830 had many tens of TB written to it in its lifetime and remained error free. I sold it on and as far as I know it is still running in great health. Modern and decent SSDs are very reliable and you don't have to worry about writing large data to them.

I'm with bledd, no point partitioning, unless your usage pattern benefits from it.
 
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