How much disc drive space on SSD does Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit require

[KSoD]

Puddle, it is not that bad. For someone who has never had a SSD drive, they wouldnt know. The difference wouldnt be there cause they would have never experienced it. Plus it is all personal preference. You dont HAVE to have it be that fast. You PREFER it to be that fast.

I dont want, need or desire an SSD Drive. I am happy with my SATA. I am not impatient where i must have everything execute within 2 seconds of me clicking it. So not it is not the difference between night and day. It is nothing more than a personal preference for people who dont want to wait. Nothing more.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

I'm not saying SSDs are necessary, they clearly aren't since everyone did just fine without them until the last year or so. However they really are as massive of a upgradeable as they claim to be. It's one of those things that one you have it you never want to go back to a system without one, it completely changes your concept of how responsive a system should be.

I know I probably sound a bit like a broken record regarding these things but I really think they are that good.

 

[KSoD]

I dont doubt they are that good mate. Dont take my responses the wrong way. I am merely saying that from where Soar stands and where i stand upgrading to a SSD just for the sake of upgrading to a SSD isnt going to benefit us. As we wouldnt have that much capacity and end up messing with our system more. Add into that having more read/write cycles on the drive we would end up hurting ourself in the long haul compared to just sticking with a normal platter drive.

Since SSD Drives only have a limited amount of read/write cycles they can live through. At least last time i heard they have not overcome that barrier. So really having to run defrag/ccleaner and so on weekly to make sure that the space is available would end up causing the drive to wear down faster.

Which is why i am suggesting that he waits till he can get the larger capacity so that he doesnt have to put the drive through such torture. It will save him from having to replace the drive in a shorter amount of time than would be normally expected. By not jumping and getting to know the speed first hand, he isnt sacrificing anything. As he never gained it in the first place.

So i have no doubt about your statements. But in the long run it also comes down to the user and their expected use of the drive. For me with the amount of installs and other stuff i do to my drives, an SSD would last me like 2 maybe 3 years. Guessing. I would love to get an SSD, if i knew it could last as long as my platter drives and it had the capacity that i could fully use.

 

[soarwitheagles]

Puddle, it is not that bad. For someone who has never had a SSD drive, they wouldnt know. The difference wouldnt be there cause they would have never experienced it. Plus it is all personal preference. You dont HAVE to have it be that fast. You PREFER it to be that fast.

I dont want, need or desire an SSD Drive. I am happy with my SATA. I am not impatient where i must have everything execute within 2 seconds of me clicking it. So not it is not the difference between night and day. It is nothing more than a personal preference for people who dont want to wait. Nothing more.

Thanks Mak for helping me understand more about SSD's. The difference between you and me is that I DO want and desire a SSD, but considering the present prices and my tight budget, it is definitely not a genuine need.

I'm not saying SSDs are necessary, they clearly aren't since everyone did just fine without them until the last year or so. However they really are as massive of a upgradeable as they claim to be. It's one of those things that one you have it you never want to go back to a system without one, it completely changes your concept of how responsive a system should be.

I know I probably sound a bit like a broken record regarding these things but I really think they are that good.

PJ, I believe you when you say it will completely change my concept [an expectation] of system response times once I finally do own a SSD...

I look forward to purchasing one as the prices keep dropping...

I dont doubt they are that good mate. Dont take my responses the wrong way. I am merely saying that from where Soar stands and where i stand upgrading to a SSD just for the sake of upgrading to a SSD isnt going to benefit us. As we wouldnt have that much capacity and end up messing with our system more. Add into that having more read/write cycles on the drive we would end up hurting ourself in the long haul compared to just sticking with a normal platter drive.

Since SSD Drives only have a limited amount of read/write cycles they can live through. At least last time i heard they have not overcome that barrier. So really having to run defrag/ccleaner and so on weekly to make sure that the space is available would end up causing the drive to wear down faster.

Mak, I did not realize SSD's have a limited amount of read/write cycles...wow, that sounds exactly the same as flash drives...I purchased a bunch of flash drives early on when they first came out and I never realized that they too have a limited amount of read/write cycles.

Which is why i am suggesting that he waits till he can get the larger capacity so that he doesnt have to put the drive through such torture. It will save him from having to replace the drive in a shorter amount of time than would be normally expected. By not jumping and getting to know the speed first hand, he isnt sacrificing anything. As he never gained it in the first place.

I really do want to wait until they have larger SSD's with lower prices...on my new build, I already installed and reinstalled Windows 7 twice and may need to do it again due to some major mess ups..

So i have no doubt about your statements. But in the long run it also comes down to the user and their expected use of the drive. For me with the amount of installs and other stuff i do to my drives, an SSD would last me like 2 maybe 3 years. Guessing. I would love to get an SSD, if i knew it could last as long as my platter drives and it had the capacity that i could fully use.

Yes, it's really that bad. It's literally a night and day difference in performance. Also the different SATA versions don't have any impact on hard drive performance since no (consumer) mechanical drives are fast enough to saturate a SATA 1.5GB's interface.

PJ, you make my my mouth water even more for an SSD when I read your statements...


Most if not all cloning software does not align partitions correctly on SSDs which negatively impacts performance. It's best to just do a clean install.

And thanks for the tip on not using cloning software due to the poor alignment. I will not use it.

 

[Saidas]

I just installed a 96GB SSD and only have W7U 32, Office 2007 and a hand full of lightweight programs and I'm already at 70GBs. A friend who has a 70GB and has about the same and his is full. I picked a 96GB to have a little extra room and many people said that would be way more than enough.
So what gives?

 

[strollin]

... Since SSD Drives only have a limited amount of read/write cycles they can live through. At least last time i heard they have not overcome that barrier. So really having to run defrag/ccleaner and so on weekly to make sure that the space is available would end up causing the drive to wear down faster. ...

While it's true that SSD's have a limited amount of WRITE cycles (no limit on read), the number of cycles available is high enough that it would take quite a few years to encounter the limit. High enough that an average user would most likely never encounter the limitation. Earlier SSD's could encounter the write limit because early algorithms tended to consistently write to the same cells all the time. Current SSDs have the TRIM algorithm which attempts to distribute writes across all the cells to maximize drive life. This article explains it: Debunking

I installed an SSD in my Acer Aspire One netbook about a year ago and I have about 40G free while running 32-bit Win 7 Pro along with apps for browsing, email, office and the like. I don't store data on the SSD, the netbook has a slot I keep a 4G sdhc memory card in for my data. If I need more storage than that, I can always plug in an external USB drive (or get a larger card).

(Oops! Didn't notice that the original thread was over a year old before Saidas revived it.)

 

[KSoD]

... Since SSD Drives only have a limited amount of read/write cycles they can live through. At least last time i heard they have not overcome that barrier. So really having to run defrag/ccleaner and so on weekly to make sure that the space is available would end up causing the drive to wear down faster. ...

While it's true that SSD's have a limited amount of WRITE cycles (no limit on read), the number of cycles available is high enough that it would take quite a few years to encounter the limit. High enough that an average user would most likely never encounter the limitation. Earlier SSD's could encounter the write limit because early algorithms tended to consistently write to the same cells all the time. Current SSDs have the TRIM algorithm which attempts to distribute writes across all the cells to maximize drive life. This article explains it: Debunking

I installed an SSD in my Acer Aspire One netbook about a year ago and I have about 40G free while running 32-bit Win 7 Pro along with apps for browsing, email, office and the like. I don't store data on the SSD, the netbook has a slot I keep a 4G sdhc memory card in for my data. If I need more storage than that, I can always plug in an external USB drive (or get a larger card).

(Oops! Didn't notice that the original thread was over a year old before Saidas revived it.)

Yes and no. If you KNOW what your doing then it could take a few years. But if you leave Windows to itself on a SSD drive then you are looking at a far shorter lifespan. Given the fact that the pagedile is kept on the drive and that file is constantly being wrote to you could easily kill a SSD drive a lot faster.

Added into that the capacity limitations, drive costs and overall lack of longentivity there isn't any real reason to jump to a SSD over a normal drive. You are not a normal user since you already stated that you don't store your data on the drive. But an average user will not takes steps to ensure that the drive will last as long as possible or even research the fact that a SSD will not last as long as a mechanical hard drive.

My argument is valid. People see articles that boast about how SSD boost performance but are to lazy to research it fully. Only to find out try made the jump and spent much money on the drive to only have it die after a short period of time. Much shorter than a traditional drive.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Yes and no. If you KNOW what your doing then it could take a few years. But if you leave Windows to itself on a SSD drive then you are looking at a far shorter lifespan. Given the fact that the pagedile is kept on the drive and that file is constantly being wrote to you could easily kill a SSD drive a lot faster.

Added into that the capacity limitations, drive costs and overall lack of longentivity there isn't any real reason to jump to a SSD over a normal drive. You are not a normal user since you already stated that you don't store your data on the drive. But an average user will not takes steps to ensure that the drive will last as long as possible or even research the fact that a SSD will not last as long as a mechanical hard drive.

My argument is valid. People see articles that boast about how SSD boost performance but are to lazy to research it fully. Only to find out try made the jump and spent much money on the drive to only have it die after a short period of time. Much shorter than a traditional drive.

SSD's hold up just fine if you leave Windows to itself. In fact I haven't bothered with any of the optimizations you mention and all of my SSD's are holding up just fine.

The reason to upgrade to a SSD is performance. Any traditional hard drive will bottleneck your system and there is no way around it. Even on a low end netbook with a 1.6ghz Atom I saw a massive improvement in performance when I installed a OCZ Vertex 2.

Due to the lack of 7mm SSDs currently available my new laptop is still running a mechanical hard drive and the negative impact it has on performance is very evident. Even with a Core i5 2410m and 4gb of DDR3 it is no where close to as responsive as my old Core 2 Duo system was with 2gb of ram and a original OCZ Agility SSD.

Also very few SSDs die due to wear or any other sort of physical problem, the culprit is usually a firmware bug which were fairly prevalent in drives with older controllers.

 

[KSoD]

Really they hold up just fine if you leave them by themselves? Apparently we have a member who would disagree since they have filled up 70GB out of their drive leaving Windows alone. Not more than 4 posts above.

That still doesnt change the fact that a traditional hard drive will last longer. I have no issues running a SATA Drive in my system over a SSD. The increase in performance is not going to net me anything over the lifetime of my PC. I am a hardcore user. I install and remove programs at least 20 times a day. That is constant writing to my drive. I change things constantly. They are not meant for this purpose. My drives can last me 8-10 years if not longer. No SSD, even with TRIM will last that long. So it is not a myth that needs debunking. It can be proven that a traditional hard drive will last longer than a SSD given normal every day use. For an average user, this may mean that the drive lasts 5 years. But the fact is they would get more life from a traditional hard drive.

Sorry that second gained from going to SSD is not going to draw me. I have lived in the age when PC's were nothing more than punch cards that you had to physically change. I can wait for my program to load and dont need everything done the instant I click it.

It isnt a negative impact on it. People just need to learn patience. Kids dont listen and react the instant you tell them something. Does that mean that they are all retarded cause they didnt learn the first time you told them? Of course not. You have to have patience with them and teach them. Just like you have to have patience with your PC and WORK WITH IT instead of acting like it is a hunk of junk cause it didnt load your program the instant you got done clicking that icon. OH NOES! You have to wait a few seconds to see Facebook! By the Gods what are we to do for those few seconds?!?

Yes that is utter sarcasm. But it drives the point home very clearly. People have gotten to the point that they do not have patience and that is the problem more than anything else. Get over it already with this performance thing. Nothing in life is instant. Why should a PC be any different.

I just installed a 96GB SSD and only have W7U 32, Office 2007 and a hand full of lightweight programs and I'm already at 70GBs. A friend who has a 70GB and has about the same and his is full. I picked a 96GB to have a little extra room and many people said that would be way more than enough.
So what gives?

As for the question presented by Saidas. You will have to move your pagefile, check for shadow copies and make sure that you deleted temp files and other things.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Really they hold up just fine if you leave them by themselves? Apparently we have a member who would disagree since they have filled up 70GB out of their drive leaving Windows alone. Not more than 4 posts above.

That still doesnt change the fact that a traditional hard drive will last longer. I have no issues running a SATA Drive in my system over a SSD. The increase in performance is not going to net me anything over the lifetime of my PC. I am a hardcore user. I install and remove programs at least 20 times a day. That is constant writing to my drive. I change things constantly. They are not meant for this purpose. My drives can last me 8-10 years if not longer. No SSD, even with TRIM will last that long. So it is not a myth that needs debunking. It can be proven that a traditional hard drive will last longer than a SSD given normal every day use. For an average user, this may mean that the drive lasts 5 years. But the fact is they would get more life from a traditional hard drive.

Sorry that second gained from going to SSD is not going to draw me. I have lived in the age when PC's were nothing more than punch cards that you had to physically change. I can wait for my program to load and dont need everything done the instant I click it.

It isnt a negative impact on it. People just need to learn patience. Kids dont listen and react the instant you tell them something. Does that mean that they are all retarded cause they didnt learn the first time you told them? Of course not. You have to have patience with them and teach them. Just like you have to have patience with your PC and WORK WITH IT instead of acting like it is a hunk of junk cause it didnt load your program the instant you got done clicking that icon. OH NOES! You have to wait a few seconds to see Facebook! By the Gods what are we to do for those few seconds?!?

Yes that is utter sarcasm. But it drives the point home very clearly. People have gotten to the point that they do not have patience and that is the problem more than anything else. Get over it already with this performance thing. Nothing in life is instant. Why should a PC be any different.


As for the question presented by Saidas. You will have to move your pagefile, check for shadow copies and make sure that you deleted temp files and other things.

That is a space usage issue not a quality one, he would have the exact same problem with a 96gb hard drive.

Traditional hard drives are not reliable, I have boxes full of dead drives at work and most of them didn't last anywhere close to 8 years. Also Intel SSD's in particular have a failure rate that is considerably lower than any mechanical hard drive.

If performance doesn't matter why not use a 700mhz Pentium 3 from 2001? Sure it takes 5 minutes to boot Windows 7 but if loading times don't matter that shouldn't be an issue.

Yes I expect my pc to be fast. For anyone who is an extensive multitasker being hit with several second delays every time you try to do something ruins your workflow and costs you a significant amount of time when you add it all up. If a $100 SSD makes that problem disappear I consider it money well spent.

KSoD for being so strongly against SSDs do you have any first hand experience with one? I was skeptical about them at first but after buying my Agility I was completely sold. In the year and a half since then I have owned SSDs from 3 of the top 4 controller manufacturers and they have all been well worth the money spent on them