SSD Partition

YamahaAlex37

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 23, 2005
Messages
1,775
I have a 64GB Crucial C300 on the way, and I was wondering if it is advisable to a small amount of space unallocated when installing Windows 7 (I will have the option when installing, correct)?

I read in some places 25% is advisable, so that would be about 50GB, or would 55GB be fine?
 
You can only do this on a brand new never used before SSD, or on a used SSD after performing a Secure Erase.

50GB on your 64GiB SSD would be a good setting; the default on the classic Sandforce models; 50GB and 100GB were physically 64GiB and 128GiB; with 28% + 6.8% spare space.

You have to click the advanced button during windows 7 setup and create a partition then you can manually select the size. Leave the rest as unallocated/free. Never write to that place. Also do not format your SSD; a quick format or 'initialize' is alright though.
 
You can only do this on a brand new never used before SSD, or on a used SSD after performing a Secure Erase.

50GB on your 64GiB SSD would be a good setting; the default on the classic Sandforce models; 50GB and 100GB were physically 64GiB and 128GiB; with 28% + 6.8% spare space.

You have to click the advanced button during windows 7 setup and create a partition then you can manually select the size. Leave the rest as unallocated/free. Never write to that place. Also do not format your SSD; a quick format or 'initialize' is alright though.

Thanks a lot sub.mesa.

So I can basically have 50/50GB full, and still get full performance? I thought I read something about drives reallocating space... it's not going to allow me to write more than 50GB if that's how big the partition is, correct?
 
The SSD uses the reserved space internally because it sometimes writes stuff to different places than windows tells the SSD to do. This is because if the SSD did what Windows wants, it would be 100 times slower than how the SSD wants to do it. So now the SSDs decide where to store data, and that means they work alot more complex than many people may think.

You should always keep some space free on your filesystem, to prevent massive fragmentation. Keeping 5GB free should be good. Not bad if you write it full once, but then free up space quickly, don't keep running for months with only 1GB free or so; that's not good!

Reserving the space should help guaranteeing performance over the long time, better than without reserving the space. Combined with TRIM the advantage would be that TRIM can give you alot of useless space, while dedicated reserved/spare space would guarantee free erase blocks for the SSD to utilize.
 
Back
Top