Boot Drive Question

[RCA]

So I am looking for a ~30GB SSD for my PC and I wanted to check how much memory my boot drive was using...

- When I went to check by selecting the whole drive it read "40.6 GB used" but when I selected the drive and highlighted all the files on the drive, it only read "15.7 GBs"

What's the deal?

[RCA]

Any non robot want to help me with this question...


One says my drive has 40GBs of used data but the other reads 15.7GBs of data...

[marlin29311]

What is your page file size?

Do you have system restore enabled?

Do you have hibernation enabled?

There's a lot of random stuff that can take up a lot of space...and a lot of stuff that you want to disable when purchasing a SSD.

[RCA]

Ahh I see.

So now my question is if I make an iso image of this drive and it reads 15GBs, will that work if I mount it to an SSD?

Or do I have to iso the whole 40GB drive?

It looks like I will probably need a 64GB SDD for a boot drive instead of a ~40GB drive. I don't want to skimp on something like that.

[marlin29311]

My suggestion for a boot drive is to go as large as possible, and start from scratch...a lot of times when you clone over your previous HDD imagine onto an SSD, you can get issues with the SSD features such as TRIM, and then data issues as well.

I would suggest getting a larger boot drive, this way you can install your applications onto the drive as well...you don't want to have to boot off an SSD, just to have to pull a game off your HDD...you lose the whole point of the SSD.

[RCA]

My suggestion for a boot drive is to go as large as possible, and start from scratch...a lot of times when you clone over your previous HDD imagine onto an SSD, you can get issues with the SSD features such as TRIM, and then data issues as well.

I would suggest getting a larger boot drive, this way you can install your applications onto the drive as well...you don't want to have to boot off an SSD, just to have to pull a game off your HDD...you lose the whole point of the SSD.

I hear ya. I don't usually game on the PC but my gaming habits usually lead me to play 2 games max at a time for a very long time, until I move on completely and never look back. I still play Fifa 07 and NCAA Football 08 on the PS3 to get my offline gaming kicks and playing Blops for my online fix. So I can't image needing something over 64GBs, I am currently using 40GBs and that is with all the applications installed (including 10GBs of space reserved for Electric Sheep screensaver).

I just did a fresh install of 7 Ultimate 3 weeks ago and I had a laundry list of crap I had to install and modify before I was happy. Took a few days on and off.

Any tips on reloading applications and getting back on track?

[marlin29311]

Time lol.

Easiest thing for me was to use something like Steam - where all my games are in one place.

Other than that, there isn't much of a trick to it all...like i said, cloning to an SSD isn't the greatest thing to do. It's best just to reload as needed...and document what you had prior.

[RCA]

Time lol.

Easiest thing for me was to use something like Steam - where all my games are in one place.

Other than that, there isn't much of a trick to it all...like i said, cloning to an SSD isn't the greatest thing to do. It's best just to reload as needed...and document what you had prior.

Yeah that is pretty much the system I used before...

Not sure if you are aware of this but ninite is a site that bundles the most common free applications into one EXE file. You double click the install file and it DLs the latest versions of the software you requested, installs it, moves on the the next application and the process is repeated. It saved me a lot of time, hope it helps you.


http://ninite.com/

[asnorton44]

Do you have show hidden files enabled?

[RCA]

Do you have show hidden files enabled?

How would I go about doing that?

I have never heard of enabling that.

[marlin29311]

Do you have show hidden files enabled?

From his screenshot, it looks like he just used the root C:\ for the query, so hidden files would still account for space. It's probably due to page files, system restore, and hibernation files that are taking up the space, but don't count towards the total size of the disc.

[Crazyirish]

Get 2 SSDs (or more) and run them in a raid 0. More speed and more space! Of course I don't know if your PC supports a raid setup. Do you know what motherboard you have?

[marlin29311]

Running SSD's in RAID doesn't allow for TRIM support, which over the long term is a bad decision for the health of the drive. Personally, I would not recommend.

[Crazyirish]

Very true. The performance of a single (good) SSD is still a significant boost over any conventional hard drive setup.

[RCA]

Get 2 SSDs (or more) and run them in a raid 0. More speed and more space! Of course I don't know if your PC supports a raid setup. Do you know what motherboard you have?

Not sure exactly, but from messing around in the bios and PC admin settings I remember there being RAID support, but only 0,1 and 3.

But like marlin said, running RAID0 with SSDs will degrade there performance over time. I am not one to tinker constantly with my rig so I like long term performance, I don't game much so I don't necessarily need 350MB/s+ speeds.