Installing Win7 on SSD

[olliewebster]

Hi,

I'm definately going to get Windows 7, and i've heard that it does very well on an SSD.
However I have a few things that I would like to sort out before I buy. First of all, how much space will Win7 take up, becuase I don't want to end up paying a lot for SSD space I'm not going to use?

And would it work for me to have all of my files, and Vista on my internal hard drive, and Win7 on my SSD? I also have a 250GB (external hard drive) disk which I use for backups. I could move Vista to another partition of my hard disk, and have a special partition for files, and have my SSD for backups, but I don't know if that'll work.

Oh, and one more thing, will I have to go through the pain of reinstalling drivers and applications after I've installed Win7, even though these drivers and applications are on my current disk?

Thanks

 

[sub mesa]

Windows 7 = about 15GB if you disable the page file and hibernation file.
I could fit a large game + Win7 on a single 30GB SSD; its not much space but its possible. If you pick the Intel X25-M 80GB G2 SSD, this surely would be enough space for the system disk, unless you have alot of games/apps.

External is not recommended; because you should not use a high-latency interface like USB2 for high-performance storage. You should use either PCI-express (first choice) or Serial ATA - no real other flavors exist that play nice with the performance level of an SSD.

If you pick the 80GB SSD; you could put Windows 7 on the first partition and Vista on the second - if you require multiple operating systems. I would use the 250GB HDD for backups/data instead not for operating system. So the SSD would be C-drive and D would be your HDD for data/backups.

Whenever you re-install an operating system, you would have to re-install the applications and drivers you used. Some apps can be copied instead of having to re-install, but this could lead to some problems with .dll libraries and such. So you probably have to re-install alot.

 

[steve9207]

To give a general idea, I have the following installed and it takes up about 20GB out of 30GB on my OCZ Vertex SSD:

■ Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate (nothing is turned on/off, pagefile, etc - only defrag is disabled).
■ Norton Internet Security 2010
■ Microsoft Office 2007 (Enterprise Edition, all programs)
■ HP Printer / Scanner Software (takes up about 1GB)
■ Misc small programs (Crystal Disk Mark, CPU-Z, etc)

Then, I use my 1TB Seagate 7200.12 in two partitions; one links to "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Videos", etc. The other one is for general media file storage. (Then, because I didn't want to just let this old SATA 2.5" 160gb drive sit and collect dust, I have that for a bunch of MP3's).

Steve