How to setup Windows on a SSD - I'm sure this has been asked before.

[SunnyD]

Today I noticed I'm down to limited space free on my SSD on this Win7 install, and I think it's causing a few small performance issues. It surprised me because I really didn't think I had eaten up most of the 80gb on this drive already as I don't have terribly much installed on it - or so I thought.

My initial gut reaction is that I need to offload certain things to the big disks. The question I have is... how do I move what I really NEED to move?

Things like my games directory are obvious... copy them over to the larger storage drive and setup a reparse point from the original location to the new one - Windows is none the wiser and everything works as it should.

The other likely candidates are the Program Files folders, which can probably handle the same setup. But the big one is the Users directory. Would there be any problems moving this one over to a storage drive as well?

Is there any better strategy to optimizing the usage of a SSD?

 

[sxr7171]

The usual stuff which is covered in many places on the internet.

Disable Hibernate
Reduce your Pagefile to a small number if you have a lot of RAM
Following from above, get more RAM
Get a program that shows your drive space usage by folder,use it find out which folders are taking the most space and move bulk data to a NAS or Internal/External HDD
Use CCleaner regularly, I have it on my recycle bin right click menu
Disable System Restore
Add/Remove Windows Features
If you want disable indexing and delete the index


I used to run Win 7 on a 32GB SSD, and these are the things I did. It wasn't a lot of fun frankly but I think 80GB is capacious for a Win 7 install. Getting a NAS was the best thing I did. It enabled me to run SSDs on all my machines.

 

[SunnyD]

Yeah, the hiberfil.sys is taking up 9gb, but I can't figure out where to actually turn it off in Win7 (my power plan setting seems to indicate hibernation is off). Page file is at 12gb, but I'm not going to touch that since I know better.

I did offload my Games directory (including steam) off to one of my 500gb storage drives and created a junction to it, that instantly freed up 26GB putting some 37gb free now after cleaning up other junk off the drive. I'm satisfied at this point.

 

[stargazr]

Move My Documents and Downloads folder - right-click folder\properties\location. Also there probably are a lot of files in Users\xxxx\appdata\local\temp file that can be deleted. But this folder cannot be moved through Windows like the other ones, I don't know if I'd try to move it.

 

[SunnyD]

Move My Documents and Downloads folder - right-click folder\properties\location. Also there probably are a lot of files in Users\xxxx\appdata\local\temp file that can be deleted. But this folder cannot be moved through Windows like the other ones, I don't know if I'd try to move it.

Actually after reading and thinking about it more... moving program files and the users folder can't be done on a live system as those directories (or subdirectories) are in use on a live logged-in system. You can set up Windows to install the Users and Program Files directories in other locations, but that's on a fresh install of Windows, which doesn't help me. Plus there's the caveat that in doing so, you remove the ability to do offline maintenance of the system with repair/recovery tools.

My Documents doesn't really have much in it. Photos take up a decent amount of space, but not terribly much. Downloads are small enough to not care about (I move stuff off regularly).

That leaves the OS and system files chewing up the rest. I'll survive I guess.

 

[Zap]

I did offload my Games directory (including steam) off to one of my 500gb storage drives and created a junction to it

You're trying too hard. Steam doesn't care if you move it. In some aspects it is almost like a portable app. You can move it around at will and it won't complain much.

Move My Documents and Downloads folder - right-click folder\properties\location. Also there probably are a lot of files in Users\xxxx\appdata\local\temp file that can be deleted. But this folder cannot be moved through Windows like the other ones, I don't know if I'd try to move it.

Last time I did this, I recall just moving the folder (hold down SHIFT, drag/drop) to another drive and Windows 7 automagically updated itself to point to the new location.

 

[SunnyD]

You're trying too hard. Steam doesn't care if you move it. In some aspects it is almost like a portable app. You can move it around at will and it won't complain much.

...

Last time I did this, I recall just moving the folder (hold down SHIFT, drag/drop) to another drive and Windows 7 automagically updated itself to point to the new location.

Well I keep things neat and tidy. Steam sits under my Games folder along with several non-Steam games. The junction is necessary to keep everything happy, along with not having to make changes to any shortcuts.

As far as moving the documents/downloads/pictures folders, yeah... easy as pie. You go into the properties for each folder and do it through the location tab. Only thing is I really don't want those folders hanging out in the middle of nowhere, and as I mentioned, they don't consume terribly much space (maybe 2GB total across 2 users).

 

[stargazr]

Actually after reading and thinking about it more... moving program files and the users folder can't be done on a live system as those directories (or subdirectories) are in use on a live logged-in system.

Sorry I wasn't suggesting moving Users folder, just Downloads and My Documents.

 

[SunnyD]

Sorry I wasn't suggesting moving Users folder, just Downloads and My Documents.

Indeed... sorry, I was more thinking out loud.