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SSD "Headroom"

ronbo613

ronbo613

Golden Member
How much empty space is desirable on an SSD? Thinking about Intel X-25.
If it is just being used as a boot drive for the OS and programs like Adobe CS4 and Office 2007; how much "headroom" would you leave? 5%, 10%? This assumes that things like scratch discs, temp folders and stuff like that have been moved to another 7200rpm "work" drive.
 
Your question is mostly answered in Anand's SSD Relapse article.

A used SSD will only have its spare area to use as a scratch pad for moving data around; on most consumer drives that’s around 7%. Take a look at this graph from a study IBM did on SSD performance:
separatedataplacement.jpg

Write Amplification vs. Spare Area, courtesy of IBM Zurich Research Laboratory

​
Note how dramatically write amplification goes down when you increase the percentage of spare area the drive has. In order to get down to a write amplification factor of 1 our spare area needs to be somewhere in the 10 - 30% range, depending on how much of the data on our drive is static.
Click to expand...
 
Yep, that pretty much answers it.
10-30% spare room needed is a real factor when you consider how small and expensive these drives are.

How do you like your X-25? I do a lot of photo and video work, no gaming. I'm thinking of the 80G X-25; I have about 38G of programming, for my boot drive. I have a 1TB WD Black as my work drive and four 1TB Seagate 7200.12 for storage. I'm thinking an SSD would be just what I need. Did you clone your SSD from another disc or did you do a fresh install?
 
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ronbo613 said:
Yep, that pretty much answers it.
10-30% spare room needed is a real factor when you consider how small and expensive these drives are.

How do you like your X-25? I do a lot of photo and video work, no gaming. I'm thinking of the 80G X-25; I have about 38G of programming, for my boot drive. I have a 1TB WD Black as my work drive and four 1TB Seagate 7200.12 for storage. I'm thinking an SSD would be just what I need. Did you clone your SSD from another disc or did you do a fresh install?
Click to expand...

For windows 7, you want a fresh install. Certain optimizations are applied at install time to enhance performance and prevent things like defrag from auto-running.
 
For windows 7, you want a fresh install. Certain optimizations are applied at install time to enhance performance and prevent things like defrag from auto-running.
Click to expand...
Wow, that would be a real hassle; having to reinstall all my programs. Can't just disable the auto stuff?
I use a separate defrag program; it's all manual. What kind of optimizations are needed?
Sorry for all the questions; but I appreciate feedback from somebody who's actually done this.
 
I love my X25-M. I couldn't stand it when my brain functioned faster than my system, and that is pretty much eliminated now. I use mine both for gaming and the more usual things like Office, Photoshop, and MATLAB. I personally just reformatted when I got my SSD, mostly because it came shortly before the release of Windows 7 and I preferred to reformat with a new OS anyways. I don't really mind reformatting. I know some people have had success with cloning and I haven't heard of too many issues. There's really not all that much optimization you need to do anymore, Windows 7 will automatically pass the TRIM command, since it already is now with your HDDs, they just don't take advantage of it. The only other thing you really need to do is disable defragmenting if it's on.
 
The following is for a 80GB G2 X25-M. No other settings were changed.
Click to expand...
Those are some impressive read/write speeds. Looks like paying for a little "elbow room" is the way to go.
 
ronbo613 said:
How do you like your X-25? I do a lot of photo and video work, no gaming.
Click to expand...

My X25's (OS and swap) really speeded up Bridge. RAW conversions seem to take about the same amount of time. Actions in CS4 are ~10% faster.
CS4 opens about 3 times faster!!!

The other benefits of SSD's makes it worthwhile. You'll see... 😀
 
Pretty sure I'm going to get one; I just have to work out the details of the bank robbery to get the money.........
 
skid00skid00 said:
The other benefits of SSD's makes it worthwhile. You'll see... 😀
Click to expand...



LOL!

That's true. All you ever read about on these forums is the increase in read/write speed.

But SSDs also:

use less power
are more durable
are lighter
are smaller

Those are some benefits too!
 
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