Is 30GB Enough for a Window 7 Home Premium Boot Drive?

I have read no as 7 can take up as much as 12GB and office with other core apps will put you in the 20GB range so I would think 64 would be the best way to go.

I think 30GB would be adequate as long as:

1) you don't plan to install anything significant in terms of applications on it

2) you don't put a large page file on it

3) you put your home directory and all data folders on another drive, and

4) you don't have, say, more than 4GB or so of memory and use sleep mode (which creates a large file in the root of the boot drive).

IMHO a big benefit of an SSD is in speeding up application startups, so if you install applications elsewhere you'll loose much of that benefit. And if you put your home directory on another drive then your browser will start slower, since the browser caches are normally in that directory. For that reason, I'd personally go with a larger drive.

I say yes, I have a 40g , I have 24 free, put all apps and caches on 1tbcaviar black. Its very fast. I have both browser(ff+IE8) start with windows and they both pop up instantly with loaded web pages when computer starts. I'm still amazed the internet connection gets negotiated that fast. Windows loads in less than 25 seconds. No hibernation file , and I use a 2g(constant) page file on the ssd. I have a utility that shows current , max size, never seen it about 500mb with 4g of memory. But leave it at 2g to be safe.

The problem with a 30gb SSD is windows allows no way to disable pagefile and hibernation while installing to my knowledge so it bloats the ssd until you remove those. Then you have to allow trim to do its thing or your performance is horrible cause a large portion on the drive is still technically written to.

I don't have trim, I've taken steps so there is minimal writing done to the ssd now, no defragging ect. But you don't have to to lose sleep about every write, or file delete. I have actually installed windows over itself, deleted a old hibernation file. Other clean up. Some programs no matter where you install them , want to leave things on you root drive. I've still not lost any of my read performance,

Actually, disabling the pagefile is very easy:



If you don't have enough RAM to disable the pagefile, just disable it on the C: drive and enable it on some other drive.

But you're right about the hibernation file - the only way to get rid of that is to disable sleep mode.

Not exactly what I said the hiberfil and pagefiles get created regardless when you install windows....disabling after that can be done. But those blocks are still written to until trim/garbage collection is done.

Ah, I see now what you meant.

Writing the blocks once is not a life-or-death thing. All of the blocks are going to be written once eventually no matter how large the drive is. The purpose of TRIM is to minimize the impact of that. Plus: creating the pagefile does NOT actually WRITE all of those blocks, it just reserves space for them. They only get written to when modified pages are flushed from memory - and on a system with enough RAM only a very small percentage of the "recommended" page file size will be used anyway unless you have a really, really huge workload.

IMHO, In terms of deciding the size of the drive, the fact that the pagefile is initially created is a *LOT* less important than moving it somewhere else later on. In fact I'd go so far as to say that it's really not something that needs to be considered at all.

Best answer selected by mirzai_m.