windows 7 - What's the best way to use both an SSD and an HDD?
2014-07
user2652379
I have a Windows 7 laptop with an 128GB SSD and an 1TB HDD. I want to use both efficiently. I have 2 plans so far.
Plan A) Use 50GB of SSD for OS. Use the rest of SSD as a cache space to boost an HDD using a caching software like eBoostr, PrimoCache, etc. Aiming for automatic cache(hit rate) management.
Plan B) Use 50GB of SSD for OS. Use the rest of SSD for crucial or frequently loaded programs like anti-virus, web browsers, some games, etc. Use HDD as a storage for games, media, docs, etc. Manual management and changing usage frequency might be problems.
What should I choose? Or are there any better ideas?
gladiator2345
I prefer Plan B, without partitioning the SSD. I install all my softwares and games to ssd and use hdd for storing movies, music, docs etc.
Sander Rijken
In case you're creating one partition, should it be as big as possible, or should a certain percentage of space be left unpartitioned?
MicE
I recommend the former (as big as possible) to allow the drive controller to more efficiently utilize free blocks during file updates. Anand from AnandTech wrote an excellent article about that last year. (Note that the link goes to a part of the article where this is explained, but I recommend to read the whole article for gaining better understanding of the concept.)
should a certain percentage of space be left unpartitioned?
If you are worried about leaving some space for the drive controller to handle wear leveling, then you should not need to worry about that since most SSDs have space reserved for that already (i.e. 30GB drives can be 32GB large in reality).
ChrisInEdmonton
As big as possible, unless you have a specific reason to leave a certain percentage unpartitioned.
pplrppl
As a general rule you want to format your SSD to 80% of the advertised size (the 20% rule stated in reverse) for performance reasons.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2899/5 discusses capacities and overprovisioning in regards to lifetime/reliability
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667&p=3 discusses free space effecting speed on Trim enabled drives:
Quote:
Performance in a TRIM enabled system is now determined not by the number of invalid blocks on your SSD, but rather the amount of free space you have. I went into a deep explanation of the relationship between free space and the performance of some SSDs here.
TRIM will make sure that you don’t have to worry about your drive filling up with invalid data, but it doesn’t skirt the bigger issue: dynamic controllers see their performance improve with more free space.
My rule of thumb is to keep at least 20% free space on your drive, you can get by with less but performance tends to suffer. It doesn’t degrade by the same amount for all drives either. Some controllers are more opportunistic with free space (e.g. Intel), while others don’t seem to rely as much on free space for improved performance.
presumably this issue is even worse if you don't use Trim.
If you already use the SSD at full capacity you may have to do a secure erase to allow the firmware to treat the "unused" space as unused.
Warning following the instructions you might find after googling secure erase or sanitary erase might lead you to the point of having an unusable SSD. you are much better off making sure a new drive is never formatted to the full capacity so you can avoid this procedure. Given that disclaimer some quick links to read in addition to the Anand articles would be:
Nothing short of resetting the SSD to this "factory fresh" mode turns used space back into unused space. You can't just reformat the disk or resize the partition or use any traditional method you would have used on rotating disks in the past.