Minimum space in a partition?

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known12345

Limp Gawd
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I was wondering, what exactly is the minimum amount of space you need in a partition to run vista premium 64 bit? Does it change with vista premium 32 bit or with windows xp? I ask because the price of SSD are dropping quickly (thought not as fast as I would like) and was wondering the minimum amount of space I need to run an SSD OS drive and hopefully a few applications. For an OS drive, 16GB seems a little too small though 64 GB seems way to much and so I was thinking 32GB would suffice but wanted to clarify this. Ive heard from a few sites that 20GB minimum is needed for a Vista drive but was not sure if they meant that 20 GB was the absolute minimum requirement or that it was suggested that atleast 20 GB be available but that vista partition can be smaller?
 
known12345 said:
I was wondering, what exactly is the minimum amount of space you need in a partition to run vista premium 64 bit? Does it change with vista premium 32 bit or with windows xp? I ask because the price of SSD are dropping quickly (thought not as fast as I would like) and was wondering the minimum amount of space I need to run an SSD OS drive and hopefully a few applications. For an OS drive, 16GB seems a little too small though 64 GB seems way to much and so I was thinking 32GB would suffice but wanted to clarify this. Ive heard from a few sites that 20GB minimum is needed for a Vista drive but was not sure if they meant that 20 GB was the absolute minimum requirement or that it was suggested that atleast 20 GB be available but that vista partition can be smaller?
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A bare Vista install runs from 8-12GB depending on the version installed. Then you have the pagefile, internet and system caches, hibernation file, system restore, and shadow copying. So if you want to minimize the footprint of the OS so that it fits on a 16GB drive, you'll have to limit and/or disable those components. I've seen pagefile.sys be as large as 8GB for a system with 4GB of RAM. That right there knocks you upto 20GB by itself, add in hiberfil.sys for the same system and you're up to 24GB. So it all depends on how you configure the system. IMO, if you cut so much out just to fit it on a 16GB drive, you've more or less eliminated all the benefits of having Vista, and you might as well stick to XP, which can function just fine on a 5GB os partition if need be.
 
That's a wide-open question if I ever saw one. To get Vista Home Premium x64 installed, you'll need at least 15GB - that's just to install it as it creates a ton of temporary files during the installation as well as copying basically the entire contents of the DVD to the hard drive, extracting them, verifying them, then copying them from the temp location on the hard drive to the proper final desitination(s). Then it goes back and deletes those temp files towards the end of the install and then makes appropriate backup copies as required of most major system files and drivers/etc in the WinSxS folder - that's how Vista handles driver rollbacks, etc.

After VHP x64 is installed, it'll consume just under 8GB of space itself - that's not counting how big your pagefile will end up being which works on the RAM x 2 formula basically, so if you've got 2GB of RAM, Vista will make a 4GB pagefile max so that's 8GB for Vista + 4GB for the pagefile and wham, that's 12GB+ gone post-install. The hibernation file will probably be created as well, so with 2GB of RAM that's another 2GB gone, now you're looking at 14GB post-install, and we're still just talking about the OS itself and no other application software.

For Vista x64, I recommend a system partition of at least 40GB bare minimum for most anyone, anything larger than that is up to you. But after a clean fresh bare installation of Vista Home Premium x64, you can easily expect on most machines to see 10 to 15GB of total filespace consumption when the installation is finally complete and the OS is ready to be used.

Start adding applications and data files (music, movies, pictures, etc) and that goes up pretty quick.

ryan: Get outta my skull man... :D You and I are starting to sound almost exactly alike... :D
 
There is a minimum partitionsize but its measurable in KB.

One thing to keep in mind, if you do decide to put vista on an SSD, Kill your swap file and get 8 or 16 gigs of ram. An SSD has a set number of write cycles. Normally thats not much of an issue but the windows page file is constantly being changed. On a hard drive thats a non inssue since theres no residual damage, on a solid state drive, there is. its like taking a block of wood and sticking your hatchet into it to hold it. Sooner or later that piece of wood is going to split. Leo Laporte said that somebody he knew, just for kicks, bought an SSD drive and kept the windows swap file (aka page file) on it, and windows killed the drive in 8 hours. Immidiatly after install disable the swap file and restart.

And as for the good side: enjoy your sustained 125MB/s .1 ms response time drive :)

ps: disable windows automatically scheduled defrag cycles, and defrag the drive as rarely as possible. Really the best Idea would be to keep all your data files on a standard hdd, and programs (that are seldom modified) on your SSD. After installing everything you might want to defrag once and then thats it, don't touch it.

Sorry for bolding everything but right now the SSD drives, while super slick, wont last in a regular windows environment without a couple of precautions, and I'd hate to see you end up out $400 because you forgot to disable something basic.
 
I would seriously doubt the report about killing an SSD in 8 hours just by putting a pagefile on it, but then again, you did say the info was passed down by Leo "I'm A Total Dumbass But I'm On TV And Podcasts And You're Not" Laporte sooo... that's about as useful as pissing on an electric fence.

Flash-RAM devices, especially SSD hardware, is designed to do the wear-leveling and even without it it takes millions of write cycles to "kill" a specific storage cell or location. A pagefile on your average person's computer, even on a massive server doing thousands of transactions a second, would take a loooooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnngggggggg damned time to "kill" a Flash-RAM storage cell or location, a lot longer than hours, or days, or weeks, or even months.

Pagefile activity on modern computers simply isn't that intensive as people seem to think it is. Besides, if any of that were true, SSD hardware wouldn't stand muster at this point. I'd say that's Leo spreading some F-U-D myself, but I've always known he's an idiot. Too bad more people don't...

It would take years for even a [H]ardcore computer enthusiast to kill an SSD. 8 hours? The device would have been defective to begin with, I'd say. Extrapolated testing (meaning testing a given number of write cycles in a given amount of time and then extrapolating the result) have clearly shown 10 years of lifespan for most Flash-RAM type devices used with personal computers. Realize that in terms of the operating system itself, not much writing takes place once that is installed - the files that make up the OS itself rarely change unless an update happens, and after a typical defrag pass they really don't get moved around much afterwards.

SSDs are just fine for computer usage and I would expect any of them to last a minimum of 2 years for most anyone.
 
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