Recommended size for Win 7 main ssd drive

As a general guideline I'd say 40GB at the minimum, perhaps 60 to 80GB for a typical installation with several programs, and 120 GB or more if you plan to install a lot of large programs.

^ +1

Although even with a 120GB Vertex 2 I have to be careful with space. I have to uninstall old games before I install new ones.

I would also base it on the usage level and data types used. Video, pics, music data sets can be very large and consume huge amounts of fresh blocks. These things are like coffee pots in a way and larger is better since you can serve quite a few more cups of "joe".. before you have to make more(GC/recover the drive).

With current firmware, capacity is the greatest defense against degradation. So, in the end you need to base it on the intended usage level and how much you're willing to spend. Otherwise if you chintz out too much?.. you'll need to modify your usage and maintenance schedule to compensate for too little capacity.  

Unless you're doing video editing, it's not really a smart move to put any of those file types on an SSD. None of them require fast access to play, so you're much better off storing them and other bulk data on a conventional hard drive that has a much lower cost/byte. Even for video editing you'd probably only keep videos on the SSD while you were actually performing the edits. Aside from that, the only valid reason I can think of to store those types files on on SSD is in the case of a laptop system that can only fit a single drive, thus ruling out the use of a hard drive.

yeah, I should have made that more clear. I didn't mean storage of the data long term.. only scratching them to the drive for the purpose of editing.

Although I will say that many don't realize how much streaming media gets scratched to the C-drive these days and can have very large impact when using extremely small drives.

I've seen many using 30 and 40GB drives who complain of degradation and throttling(Sandforce Durawrite) simply because they've been on utube(among others) or messing with torrents too heavily without changing the DL'd files directory. Much of this data is buffered or scratched to disk and can impact an SSD.

So, data doesn't necesarily need to be stored.. just written to the SSDwas the main point there.