is a 32gb ssd enough for windows 7 64bit bootdrive ?
Yes, just, but you won't be able to put much of the way in additional software on it, which is half of the point tbh :thumbdown:
I would imagine it would get a bit annoying after a month or 2 having that little space to play with :(
got 2x 1tb drives for storage etc , just installed a 32gb "OCZ Onyx Series SATA II 2.5" SSD" .
boot times are less than half that of the 1tb drive , not much space left so i will have to move the pagefile .
tbh even though this only cost £40 the performance has supprised me for one of the entry level ssd's , looking forward on getting a larger faster drive to put a few games on
http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-onyx-series-sata-ii-2-5-ssd.html
I thought they generally advised keeping swap files and the like of frequently changed/large files on standard hard drives and just putting software/static files onto SSD for the best speed?
Or has that changed with the TRIM command? I would have thought it would make more sense anyway, let the SSD fly through files at top speed and paged memory can be dealt with by a swapfile on the regular disk.
on my 64GB I have 2 games (Dead space 2 and Civ 5) windows 7 64 bit, and light apps (NO photoshop or even office!) and have 5GB free space :panic:
Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on February 17, 2011, 15:07:53 PM
I thought they generally advised keeping swap files and the like of frequently changed/large files on standard hard drives and just putting software/static files onto SSD for the best speed?
thats what i intend on doing ;) , just need to find the best way of doing things in windows 7 . it's a little differant compaired to vista and xp which i am used to
For best performance (If you have lots of RAM) you can create a RAM disk and mount the swap file and temp files there!
and how would i manage that in win7 64bit ? , i have 8gb of ram is this enough ? .
just moved the pagefile to my d-drive and freed up over 8gb of space , windows folder is now only 12.4gb in size instead of 24.2gb
I wouldn't even consider the ramdisk idea unless I had at least 12Gb of RAM (for Windows 7 at least as it does eat RAM for breakfast), but that's just me and my 24x7 heavy app use.
Especially if your RAM disk was using 8GB! Leave it on your other hard disk and it'll be fine ;)
Quote from: XEntity on February 17, 2011, 15:37:03 PM
For best performance (If you have lots of RAM) you can create a RAM disk and mount the swap file and temp files there!
OK I presume this works because I know you know what you're talking about, but isn't putting swap on a RAMdisk somewhat counter-intuitive? ie you're using up RAM to make somewhere to put stuff when you run out of RAM? or is my understanding of how swap works just insanely naive?
My understanding of swap files is that they are a data store for the least recent/least fetched items that want to reside in memory, also I think your swap file is supposed to be 1.5 times your phsyical memory to allow enough additional swap space and prevent problems addressing it all? Unless you had massive amounts of memory for your given apps/OS I don't see how this would work reliably either.
Personally my eyes are set on a 64GB Crucial RealSSD C300 for my next build.
I think 32 would be a bare minimum for your OS, apps and some breathing space. If you are going to SSD, at least try and get what is right for you.
page file.....
I turned mine off years and years ago - ever since I moved up to 8gig of ram
and I've never had any problems at all :-)
(must be 5+ years now)
if you run out of space, why not not another and raid them ?
back the drive up onto your storage drive, raid the ssd's and then copy tha backup back ?
Quote from: knighty on February 17, 2011, 21:06:07 PM
if you run out of space, why not not another and raid them ?
back the drive up onto your storage drive, raid the ssd's and then copy tha backup back ?
still only have 32gb even though it is in raid
Not if you RAID 0 them, you would only have 32Gb if you mirrored them (RAID 1)
yeah, it's twice as fast too !
well in that case i will order another monday , erm when did the forum colours change lol :w00t:
afaik TRIM doesn't work under RAID.
Quote from: matt5cott on February 18, 2011, 00:40:58 AM
afaik TRIM doesn't work under RAID.
i did not know that :dunno: , thx for the info ;)
here is a benchmark i tried with the OCZ Onyx Series SATA II 2.5" SSD 32gb in raid 0 , not to bad tbh and the more you add the faster it gets
(http://www.ocztechnology.com/images/thumbs290x290/Onyx1_2.jpg)
(http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/8205/ssdh.jpg)
video review of 8 of them in raid 0 = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ-lpxDCVhQ&feature=channel
in the vid you linked to it says...
"Remember that while TRIM doesn't work in RAID, garbage collection will, so as long as you leave the array idle sometimes, performance should not degrade."
no idea what garbage collection is.... but sounds like that should sort it ?
edit:
http://hothardware.com/News/OCZ-and-Indilinx-Collaborate-On-New-SSD-Garbage-Collection-Scheme/ (http://hothardware.com/News/OCZ-and-Indilinx-Collaborate-On-New-SSD-Garbage-Collection-Scheme/)
sounds like that takes care of it ?
what does the trim feature do ?
the drives degrade over time... a bit like compact flash cards used to (do they still do that?)
there's a limited number of times you can write/overwrite each sector... it's a big number... but old hard drives normally keep overwriting the same bit again and again...
the trim feature stops it doing that... it won't overwrite old deleted data until all the free space has been used up, and then it overwrites the deleted stuff in order....
you don't see/notice any of this tho, it just works/looks like any other hard drive to the user
I've got 2x30gb ocz vertex ssds in raid0
they are very fast although I was hoping for faster, the write speeds dont seem to increase much in raid on the early ssds.
I have win7 ultimate 64bit, office 2010, general untils and a couple of games installed on it and I am at 40.5GB so 32gb might be a bit small.
I've not seen any slow down on the drives but I have left teh computer in the bios for a few hours a couple of times to let the 'garbage collection' happen whatever it is.
edit: I was being stupid the 40.5GB is free space :-[
do you need to be in the bios for garbage collection ? does it work if the pc it just left running ?
mines on 24/7....
yeah i think it works windows as long as the drive is not used for PF and windows isnt set to switch it off after so much idle time.
the drive needs to be completely idle for it to work afaik.
how long does it need to be idle for does anybody know ?
I can't find any numbers, but from what I've read it's not very long.... and it doesn't take very long either....
one review did a load of read/write/delete to a drive to slow it down, tested it's performance to get a base line, then tested it again after 5min idle and saw an improvement... then left it idle for an hour and tested again and the drive was back to as-new speeds
so it must start working after less than 5 min idle :)
i tried to reinstall windows on just one drive , not sure why but it was unable to install windows7 64bit on a single drive but will install on a raid 0 setup . seems odd to me that before i setup raid it worked fine installing win7 , seems odd that it that it no longer will install on a single drive
I had problems when I fitted a SSD to my HTPC, it took me 3 attempts to get 7 installed it kept grinding to a halt at the part where it starts writing to disk, but has worked fine since :dunno:
below is what i was told at the ocz forums
QuotePut the drives back in RAID and use onboard RAID utility to properly break the array or Secure Erase the drives.
what do you use to "Secure Erase the drives" ?
Can't you cut win7 x64 down any? I got the 32bit version on an 8gb drive.
with moving the pagefile and turning off drive indexing i have it down to around 18gb , got some other things to try but i want to go back to running to a non raid setup but am not able to atm
why do you want to stop using raid ?
cause i wan trim support as well ;) , this setup has got to last me a while as i have spent to much on my rig just lately
on;t the garbage collection thing handle it for you ?
if you want to "break" the raid array, could you remove 1 of the drives while you install ?
Quote from: knighty on February 21, 2011, 23:05:56 PM
on;t the garbage collection thing handle it for you ?
if you want to "break" the raid array, could you remove 1 of the drives while you install ?
it will have to do atm , tried removing one of the drives and win7 install said it could not write to the drive
how do you secure erase a ssd ?