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SSD Sizing

C

Caveman

Platinum Member
I'm still back in the stone age per my sig, but I'm planning on building a Haswell rig within the month.

Back in the day, I'd look at all my planned software I was going to install and basically get double that size HDD since performance with those rolled of at ~50% full mark.

Are SSDs similar or do they stay fast through a nearly full drive?

Also, any recommendations for drive structuring? I understand it's common to put the OS on one (smaller) drive and dump all the other software to a "large" drive.

Ultimately though, doesn't best performance come fram having all the program data on the same drive as the OS?
 
For best performance, it's usually recommended to leave some free space, like 25% of the drive, empty. Easiest way to do that is to just leave 25% of the drive unformatted/partitioned.

The overlap of the best price/perf and the best overall cost is around 240-256 GB models right now. Those should have more than enough space to hold the OS and ALL of your applications/programs. If you have a lot of data, you can put that on a spinner. Win7+ are all pretty good about this, you can move all of the 'visible' folders in your windows user folder to the spinning drive so that your music/movies/games/etc don't eat up SSD space.
 
Thanks for answer... So, why do some preach that having a small (30GB) drive dedicated to the OS is a good thing? I it just for convenience fo the loss of a little speed... Or does it actually inprove performance? I'd assume most people running SSDs don't use RAID setups for additional speed... Or do they?
 
That sounds like "old wisdom" from the time when SSDs were MUCH more expensive.

It doesn't make much sense anymore with larger capacity, and increasingly affordable, drives.
 
When my 64GB SSD was in my desktop as my OS drive, it got up to about 80% capacity... and really started to slow down. There were a number of factors besides nearly full capacity that affected it, but I believe that was one of the primary reasons.

When I replaced it with a 256GB SSD, I secure erased the 64GB, put it in my HTPC, updated the FW and installed a clean W7 OS... it's at about 50% capacity. The thing flies now.

Performance wise, the 250GB +/- is probably the best, performance drops as you go either way, up or down, away from the 250GB'ish drives (at least it used to.) I installed a 256GB SSD as my desktop's only system drive, with everything installed on it, including Steam... and it's right at 60% and works very well.

Some use the smaller SSD's as scratch drives or cache drives, but as E of W says using a smallish drive for just the OS is old school. I wouldn't buy anything less than a 120GB drive from here forward, with the anticipation of not going over 60-70% drive capacity ever.
 
Caveman said:
Thanks for answer... So, why do some preach that having a small (30GB) drive dedicated to the OS is a good thing? I it just for convenience fo the loss of a little speed... Or does it actually inprove performance? I'd assume most people running SSDs don't use RAID setups for additional speed... Or do they?
Click to expand...
A small SSD for the OS will make the OS slower. As flash density increases, smaller SSDs have fewer dies to use, so speed is slower on the smaller ones. Commonly, 120GB are much slower than 250GB, and 250GB a bit slower than 500GB. The 250GB capacity point seems to get the most good sales, as well. Recently, the Samsung 840 Evo 250GB, Crucial M500 240GB, and Toshiba Q 256GB have all had sales for $150.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crucial-m500-1tb-ssd,3551-8.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crucial-m500-1tb-ssd,3551-9.html
There's an example of it, being tested. Notice in the 2nd page how the service times for read and write cluster together (look at the graph's scales: the results are much closer together than they appear at first glance!), except for the newer 120GB models, save for the Sandisk Extreme II, which carries a price premium for pretty much just that (performance consistency is its thing).
 
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