Is 120GB SSD large enough for my boot drive?

[dave_the_nerd]

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?

Sandforce controllers do "garbage collection" on their own, without input from the OS. It's supposedly "good enough" but that's one of those personal preference things.

 

[Coup27]

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?

Samsung's SSD Magician offers includes a feature which allows you to forcibly run TRIM followed by garbage collection.

 

[Pray To Jesus]

Bigger is better.

 

[zephyrprime]

I have a 256 and it is barely sufficient. I would highly recommend against anything smaller. It's not jsut about the boot drive. It's annoying to have to relocate your user folders so the extras space is greatly needed.

 

[Baked]

I have a pair of 40s in RAID 0 as the OS boot drive. And a 256 for games. Ext USB 3.0 docking station for conventional HDD as backup/restore drive for the OS. I got all my bases covered!

 

[johny12]

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.

HyperX 3K 120GB which has intel RAID 0 drivers, are better than single 240GB drives since two 120GB models in RAID 0 perform much faster than a single 240GB SSD. If you have the TRIM drivers / controller firmware up to date, then no TRIM issues should be prevalent. Also as BeauCharles indicates performance of SSD especially TRIM is proportional to the size of the drive. With smaller SSDs, it is really beneficial to have much free space left.