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SSD - Primary or Secondary?

P

P2Mc28

Member
I picked up Kingston's SSDNow 40gb a while back, and it's been fantastic.

Except for the size.

Win7 + WoW, which is all I intended to put on it, eat nearly every scrap of space on the poor thing. I figured that would be fine except... I can't put 100% of everything on my secondary drive. AIM, for instance, gave me no option to install elsewhere. Dreamweaver is forced to install at least in part on the Windows drive. All in all, 37.2 GB simply didn't turn out to be enough space as I had hoped.

So, here's what I've been contemplating:

1 - Reformat, install Win7 on my 300gb WD drive (nothing fancy). Install games / apps that need speed on SSD.

2 - Reformat, install Win7 on SSD, everything else on secondary.

3 - Buy a new drive as soon as I'm able. Ideally, another SSD, dedicate one to Win7. Or perhaps a Velociraptor.

Are there any glaring issues with any of my options? Any particular reason Windows should go on the SSD rather than the games I play? I figured faster load times on my games > faster start times w/ Windows.
 
There are some ways you can free up some space. Disable hibernation, delete hyber.sys or whatever it's called, cut down on swap file size, reduce the space set aside by the recycle bin, and delete the patches in your WoW folder.

Windows and WoW will probably benefit more than anything else from being run off an SSD.
 
I've taken a lot of steps to reduce the amount of space used. I've moved my temporary files off the primary drive, disabled system restore, and never let anything pile up in my recycle bin. I haven't disabled Hibernation though, that sounds like a good idea.

The general conclusion I've come up with is WoW and Win7 cannot coexist on a 40gb drive in my environment.
 
AFAIK one of WoW's biggest issues is the random tiny reads, most modern games won't improve much from an SSD but WoW is one of the few that does. (I suppose it isn't a modern game)

Getting rid of hibernation should free up equal space to the amount of ram you have... honestly, I would still try and cram the two onto the drive.
 
If you're willing to risk a bit (keep a recent backup), you can try moving the winsxs directory to a normal hard drive and symlink it from the original location. That will free up at least 4GB of space, maybe more.

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:vista_move_side_by_side

Also, migrate your profile to the normal hard drive.

Start here: http://superuser.com/questions/77214/move-windows-profile-directory

The two combined with disabling hibernation should free up 8-10GB which should be enough for your purposes.

Symlinks are your friend, as I've learned. Get Link Shell Extension (http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html) to make your job easier.
 
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Oh awesome... definitely some excellent ideas I never knew existed. Glad I came here.

Thanks! I think I'll work on this once I get home from work today.
 
Not sure if it's been mentioned yet, but reducing or disabling System Restore completely will gain you back some space. You can use the disk cleanup tool to delete old restore points and get even more space back.
 
buy a second same exact drive (maybe used) and double up for RAID0. 100% storage increase and a large, non-linear performance increase.
 
How big is a WoW install these days? I imagine with all the expansions it won't be small, but I'm surprised it doesn't fit on your SSD.

A clean Win7-64 install on my Vertex is about 11 to 12 GB once hibernate is disabled and pagefile moved to second hard disk.
 
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