SSD - How big for win7

[ronnn]

Feel free to ignore if I should have tried harder with search.

Moving to win7 and want a ssd for os, surfing, photoshop and steam. How many gb do I need to be comfortable?

 

[adairusmc]

How much stuff do you have in Steam?

I am using just an X25-V 40gig drive with my programs installed and I have plenty of space.

I doubt there is an affordable SSD out there that can fit my steam folder, so I keep it on one of my storage drives.

 

[ronnn]

Can probably live with 10-15gb on steam. Mainly play one game at at time and wanted to take advantage of the quick loading of levels.

 

[WildW]

A full Win7 install is around 12GB - I have a now aging OCZ Vertex 30GB, Win7 x64 and lots of apps installed, > 10GB free at the moment.

The accepted wisdom around here is that installing games onto SSD doesn't achieve too much speed-wise compared to hard disk, but I can see it varying by game, particularly where level loading is near constant (something like wandering around in Oblivion) or gives a competetive edge (being first into a round of Battlefield 2).

I have my Steam folder on a relatively quick hard disk and try not to think about it too much. Installing games on SSD may shave a second here or there but it's not earth-shattering. Getting Windows onto SSD is the big advantage.

 

[flamenko]

Depending on your configuration, you can get Windows 7 installed at just over 8.5gb. Some games are very beneficial on the ssd but only because there are some astounding changes in load times and scene transitions. For the most part games are bottlenecked by the CPU.

I would recommend a Intel X25m 80Gb as a healthy start and concede you could prob go smaller if necessary by arranging outside propewrty for you music/video/picture files...

I use an external as well as a usb.

 

[rootaxs]

FWIW, i have Win 7 Ultimate, CS3 Master Collection, Office 2007 Ultimate (including a 3gb .pst), all current updates and a few odd programs (browser, ftp, really small things) and i've got 18 gb free on a 64gb SSD.

 

[JAG87]

Can probably live with 10-15gb on steam. Mainly play one game at at time and wanted to take advantage of the quick loading of levels.

Don't bother, games on SSD is a waste of money.
Load times are not much better, cost is certainly not justifiable.
OS + Apps only on SSD. 40GB is enough.

 

[jimhsu]

Don't bother, games on SSD is a waste of money.
Load times are not much better, cost is certainly not justifiable.
OS + Apps only on SSD. 40GB is enough.

Considering how valuable the space yes, that is true. However, games like WoW see freaking massive improvements, while something else like Crysis will see virtually no change. It depends ... a lot.

 

[sandorski]

How much Swapfile space is needed for Win7?

 

[jimhsu]

I use a ridiculously low size like 256MB, mainly for compatibility reasons with certain apps. It really doesn't matter, just don't disable it.

 

[ronnn]

Thanks guys! You made it small enough that price is no excuse not to go for it.

Is intel that much better than ocz?

 

[flamenko]

I dont use a swap/pagefile whatsoever and havent since Vista first came out. I am a power user and have 4Gb ram and I have never had so much as a warning that my memory was getting low. Check out my my SSD Optimization Guide recommendations below.

Is Intel better than OCZ...Here goes!!!!!

Intel has far better benchmarks with respect to small 4-8kb random reads and writes. These are very important to your OS and application starting and operation and have alot of play in why the system boots so fast and applications start so fast.

 

[sandorski]

I dont use a swap/pagefile whatsoever and havent since Vista first came out. I am a power user and have 4Gb ram and I have never had so much as a warning that my memory was getting low. Check out my my SSD Optimization Guide recommendations below.

Is Intel better than OCZ...Here goes!!!!!

Intel has far better benchmarks with respect to small 4-8kb random reads and writes. These are very important to your OS and application starting and operation and have alot of play in why the system boots so fast and applications start so fast.

This is good to know. Makes a 30 or 40gb SSD a real possibility.

 

[HendrixFan]

This is good to know. Makes a 30 or 40gb SSD a real possibility.

The hibernation file (hiberfil.sys) will suck up alot of space too. It eats up whatever your RAM size is, so for me it was 6GB.

I used vLite to get my Windows 7 install to around 6GB. I moved the pagefile to my spindle drive (and shrunk it), got rid of hibernation and system restore. With vLite I'm pretty sure I only removed the additional languages and Media Center as those ate up a ton of space. Pretty much anything else you cut out saves a few MBs, so it isn't worth possible compatibility issues. With all my programs installed I am using 16GB out of 30GB. My games get installed onto my Raptor drive that I have had for a long time.

 

[flamenko]

The SSD Optimization guide covers all the ways to optimize and save yourself some valuable SSD propery.

 

[Hacp]

It depends if you're using a laptop or desktop. If you're using a laptop, get the biggest drive you can afford. If you're on a desktop, get an average sized drive around 60gb.