Is 120GB SSD large enough for my boot drive?

[donfm]

I'm really new to this SSD technology. I built my computer about 5 years ago and my WD boot drive seems to be going bad. I was going to pick this Kingston V300 SATA III MLC 120GB drive up at staples. It's on sale for $89 and an additional 20% off with coupon. It's a steal at this price. The drive has some great reviews at HardOCP

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/01/28/kingston_ssdnow_v300_120gb_ssd_review/#.US0tQzewVDg

I'm running Win XP Pro 32bit on my old computer. (Yea I know it's old school but it serves my purposes) with 4GB of RAM. I was planning on using this for the boot drive. My question is am I wasting my money buying only a 120GB drive now? Would I be better served waiting for a deal on a 250GB SSD. This is just to tide me over until I decided to build a new computer but I want the drive to be usable down the road on another system. I have a 640GB SATA drive I would use for storage along with the SSD boot drive. Your thoughts??

 

[Coup27]

Absolutely. On an XP system you could get away with 32GB has a boot drive. Although you really need to decide what you want installed on your "boot" drive. A traditional installation of Windows XP fully updated, all your motherboard drivers, an office suite, anti virus, general non-specialist programs and a sub-set of your data (data -media (movies, music, pictures)) would actually fit under 32GB. Obviously I've estimated a few things but you see my point.

 

[Remobz]

Absolutely. On an XP system you could get away with 32GB has a boot drive. Although you really need to decide what you want installed on your "boot" drive. A traditional installation of Windows XP fully updated, all your motherboard drivers, an office suite, anti virus, general non-specialist programs and a sub-set of your data (data -media (movies, music, pictures)) would actually fit under 32GB. Obviously I've estimated a few things but you see my point.

Yes, I am still using Windows XP pro on my work computer and I have under 35GB of used space so far. I have no games on it and routinely clean up unwanted videos and picture files.

 

[dac7nco]

I ran an Intel 80GB(G1) drive on XP(SP2) for awhile with Adobe everything, A huge documents folder and a few games. XP was/is very small. Don't worry about any performance loss either - if Garbage Collection was fine under XP five years ago, it'll be better now.

Daimon

 

[donfm]

Thanks guys for the input. I figured it would be plenty big enough but I'm new at this SSD drive technology. I guess the only reason to go larger would be to use on my next system but by then the prices may have dropped enough I would go even larger.

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

I've outgrown my 120. It would be nice to start with but I'd love a 250 at this point.

 

[donfm]

I've outgrown my 120. It would be nice to start with but I'd love a 250 at this point.

Well bigger is usually better but if you have a secondary large drive for storage I don't see the issue.

 

[tracerbullet]

Well bigger is usually better but if you have a secondary large drive for storage I don't see the issue.

Exactly.

 

[John Connor]

I have a 120 GB Adata SSD and use XP 64 and it works great. It is filling up though. I should move my music to the platter. I also install games on the SSD that will run faster and boot quicker, like BF2 and FS2004. When I made the clone to the SSD it also cloned a few other games like Call of duty world at war and call of duty 4 and call of duty black ops. I don't want to uninstall those as I have not beat all of them.


A 120 GB SSD is more than enough. Just have to not install a lot of stuff to it. When I installed the SSD I moverd the temp folder to the platter and changed the page file size on the drive to 1024 MB. There are other tricks that you should do in order to increase the life expectancy of the drive. Look for a program called SSD Tweaker.

 

[beginner99]

Just for OS and most common apps its more than enough. I have a 80 gb ssd and 2 games on it.

What has a huge impact is a) turning of hibernation and b) lowering the size of the page file. Because AFAIK per default both are as large as the amount of RAM you have (ok, not that big of an issue with 4 Gb of RAM, but with 16 GB on a 80 GB SSD...)

 

[donfm]

Just for OS and most common apps its more than enough. I have a 80 gb ssd and 2 games on it.

What has a huge impact is a) turning of hibernation and b) lowering the size of the page file. Because AFAIK per default both are as large as the amount of RAM you have (ok, not that big of an issue with 4 Gb of RAM, but with 16 GB on a 80 GB SSD...)

What size pagefile do you recommend? How do you take the computer out of hibernation in the power settings?

 

[Rvenger]

What size pagefile do you recommend? How do you take the computer out of hibernation in the power settings?

Run CMD Prompt as Admin, type Powercfg -h off

You will save the amount of space you have as RAM.

 

[sm625]

I just cleaned up my drive on my 4 year old windows xp installation. I cut it down to 24GB. It has several development studios on it. (Though obviously nothing from xilinx or altera lol)

 

[UaVaj]

use to think 128gb was big but it is getting small fast. also for ssd. you want to leave 1/3 of it empty.

win7 x64 no pagefile - 19gb, ms office - 4gb, wow - 19gb, sc2 - 10gb, bf3 - 28gb
you can see where this is going.




as for the op specific case running xp and none of these games. 120gb is plenty.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Still have about 40GB free on my 90GB.

Just bought a 750GB data drive to replace my 320 though.

 

[BFG10K]

I have Windows 7 x64 installed to a 30GB partition, and more than half of it is free.

 

[max347]

You should really look into Windows 7 or 8 if you are going with an SSD, as XP/Vista do not support TRIM.

 

[WaTaGuMp]

I just got this drive today using a 30% off coupon from Office Depot, total with tax, $68.04.

 

[sandorski]

Just built the rig in my sig using a Samsung940 120gb as Boot for Win8. Took about 40gb, still plenty of room.

 

[donfm]

I just got this drive today using a 30% off coupon from Office Depot, total with tax, $68.04.

You're lucky I tried to take that 30% coupon to Staples and the manager would not honor it.

 

[WaTaGuMp]

You're lucky I tried to take that 30% coupon to Staples and the manager would not honor it.

BS, they take coupons from competitors, go fight them on it. I made sure they took it before even going there, the guy spoke to the manager and told him yes. Hell print out this thread and show them someone used it, or even the thread below.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1747789

 

[VirtualLarry]

For XP specifically, which does not support TRIM, I would recommend the Intel X25-M G2 drive being sold at TigerDirect for $90 AR. It's a 160GB SATA2 SSD.

That way, you can use the Intel toolbox to do weekly TRIM.

 

[BeauCharles]

Lack of TRIM doesn't really matter for XP on a 120GB drive. If he doesn't pack it full it'll keep performing pretty well for years. I have a PC will XP and a half dozen old games and its sitting at 50GB. Even if idle/background garbage collection isn't completely efficient for Sandforce on XP over time its still going to be so much better than a traditional HD performance-wise. For $72 I don't think he could do better going smaller. The larger drive will perform better than a 32/60/64 GB SSD as well.

 

[Dadofamunky]

For XP specifically, which does not support TRIM, I would recommend the Intel X25-M G2 drive being sold at TigerDirect for $90 AR. It's a 160GB SATA2 SSD.

That way, you can use the Intel toolbox to do weekly TRIM.

+1. Like the man said...

 

[donfm]

Thanks for the suggestions. I was sort of hoping to get a SATA III drive only for the reason that when this old computer fails I can still use it on a new build. Are there no other utilities to clean up an SSD hard drive other than the Intel?