What capacity SSD for OS installation?

broona

broona

broona

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I'm looking at getting a boot SSD to run alongside my 1tb Samsung F1, but unsure as to what size I'll need.

Treesize reports my current Vista Business 32bit install to be circa 20gb, so I assume that a 30gb drive would do, but do I need to have much in the way of free space for it to run efficiently too?

I'll be looking to upgrade to Windows 7 when it's released, probably the 64bit version, and I assume this will need more than my current 20gb? Would a 64gb drive be sufficient?

Looking to do this reasonably cheaply, less than £100 ideally, so would the 64gb Samsung drive be my best option, or should I wait for the prices to come down and look at a 128gb drive? Cheers.
 
64GB will be enough, but you won't be able to install a great deal of software alongside it to benefit from the improved performance.
 
I believe Windows 7 will have a smaller footprint than Vista, My install is currently at 24 gig (Ultimate X64).

I'm also in the market for an SSD but like most don;t have a great deal to spend. I'm still deciding whether to get 64gig or 128gig as 32 gig just isnt enough.
 
nutsnut said:
I believe Windows 7 will have a smaller footprint than Vista, My install is currently at 24 gig (Ultimate X64).

I'm also in the market for an SSD but like most don;t have a great deal to spend. I'm still deciding whether to get 64gig or 128gig as 32 gig just isnt enough.
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Get the 128, leaves plenty of room for your programs and its not a good idea to 'fill' ssd's anyway. On vista got 47GB free of 119GB though I do have most things installed to that.
 
I agree - 128Gb is a much better size as you'll get OS and Apps on with some room to spare - take it from one who's been there that once you've tried an SSD you'll want to put everything on it as they are just so much more responsive than a regular HDD.

The main reason that I have the RAID 0 array of 3 x 30Gb Vertex's is that the initial one ran out so I got another, then found that 60Gb wasn't enough so another... 90Gb is enough for me at the mo.
 
128 is more than enough, plus you have spare space for games and software.

I notice a massive difference on the start time of paintshop pro. 64 would be a little tight for me.
 
Looks like I'll be waiting a little while then until the decent 128gb drives come down in price, cheers. :D
 
broona said:
Looks like I'll be waiting a little while then until the decent 128gb drives come down in price, cheers. :D
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might be a long wait as ssd's are still more of a luxury item in the pc world. Dell, hp, etc. have no intentions of putting them in desktops anytime soon so until they sell on a massive scale some other way, prices will remain the same. The more demand = the more that are made = cheaper they sell. Selling them to enthusiasts alone is not going to make that happen imho.
 
Ninja Please! said:
might be a long wait as ssd's are still more of a luxury item in the pc world. Dell, hp, etc. have no intentions of putting them in desktops anytime soon so until they sell on a massive scale some other way, prices will remain the same. The more demand = the more that are made = cheaper they sell. Selling them to enthusiasts alone is not going to make that happen imho.
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Very true, but they have come down quite considerably in price over the last few months, so would it not be prudent to assume that they will continue to do so?
 
broona said:
Very true, but they have come down quite considerably in price over the last few months, so would it not be prudent to assume that they will continue to do so?
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They are and they will, different brands like the Falcon replacing the Vertex etc as everyone competes for the same customers.
 
If you're only using 20gb currently, I don't see why everyone is suggesting the 128GB ones. Clearly, unless you change your usage habits and start installing things like games on it, you will be fine with the Samsung 64GB you mentioned. I have a win7 x64 install on my laptop taking up 36gb ish, and that's with nearly 8GB documents and stuff, and 6GB of page file/hibernate file.
64gb will do you fine unless you want to start installing games etc on it.
 
If you want only your OS on the SSD then 30GB/32GB would suffice to include future Windows updates if you use a Windows OS. I ended up getting a 60GB. Vista 64 + SP1 + updates and a couple of small applications used up 17GB. I still have plenty of space to put on FS9 & FSX which would have maxed out a 30GB drive. You really don't want to go over 80% - 90% capacity on SSDs so the onboard wear leveling utility can do it's thing, if your SSD has it (OCZ SSDs do).
 
Yeah, but it seems such a shame to fit such a great upgrade and only put your OS on it. All you really get then is really fast boot times.

There is so much more to have :)
 
sxndy said:
Yeah, but it seems such a shame to fit such a great upgrade and only put your OS on it. All you really get then is really fast boot times.

There is so much more to have :)
Click to expand...

There is of course the general responsiveness that should benefit any windows use (from what people have posted above - I have no personal experience of ssd's as yet)

I would agree however - try and install the apps you use the most on your C drive also (or partitioned d of course)
 
Have you considered putting the disk compression on. I do this on all my drives, including the SSD. Done this for years with no problems, and no real difference in performance.

The only peformance thing I found with compression is it was faster when working with text based files when i'm doing development. The compression should also extend the life of your SSD as it's not storing as much physical data when it writes each time.
 
With HDDs, compression might not impact performance greatly for random reads/writes, because seeking is the slow part of the setup and so the CPU might be able to do the compression calculations as fast as the HDD can write. But when using SSD, that bottleneck is removed, so compression will slow things down.
Text-based files are a slightly different case, as often the compression level can be very high, and so reading less data from the (slow) HDD and expanding into more data via decompression at the CPU, might cause them to load quicker depending on the amount of fragmentation. But again, I remain highly sceptical that it is faster than without compression on SSD.

Have you got any benchmarks of compressed vs uncompressed speeds?
 
I have just done 2 tests with CrystalDiskMark. The settings were a 50MB file and 5 passes.

Compression OFF

Seq Read 113.7 - Write 69.92
512k Read 105.6 - Write 45.73
4k Read 15.90 - Write 1.883

Compression ON

Seq Read 113.8 - Write 70.06
512k Read 105.7 - Write 45.92
4k Read 15.90 - Write 2.0037

Numbers aside my PC feels no different in performance with compression on.

I agree that SSD is much faster then HDD, but you have to appreciate how fast a modern PC CPU is at crunching those numbers. I'm running XP64, Kindston Value 64GB, and 1.86 dual core (not overclocked).

EDIT. I also have ALL caching turned off for the SSD in windows.
 
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Ok, I don't trust the data above as the numbers are so close - so I did another test.

I copied a folder from a HDD to the SDD drive, I did this twice once with compression on, and once off. For completeness I also copied these folders (one compressed, one un-compressed) back to my HDD. I timed all these actions.

The folder was my TomTom Home (satnav) folder - it's a 4.83 GB folder, and contains 6708 files, and 513 folders.

Every time I did a copy I performed a full reboot to ensure no files were being cached in memory.

1) Copy the folder from HDD to SDD - Compression On - 9 minutes 54 seconds.
Reboot system
2) Copy the folder from HDD to SDD - Compression OFF - 7 minutes 39 seconds.

I now had two idential folders with same data on SSD drive, one compressed, one un-compressed.

Reboot System
3) Copy the compressed folder from SDD to HDD - 2 minutes 56 seconds.
Reboot System
4) Copy the un-compressed folder from SDD to HDD - 2 minutes 45 seconds.

So I stand corrected - compression does slow down SSD drives, however considering the price of SSD and read is almost idential, and it's only effecting writes i'll keep compression on.

Also worth pointing out i'm on a 3 year old 1.86 Dual Core, on a faster PC the differences above should be less.
 
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