Partition for SSD?

Is there any advantage in keeping an SSD partitioned into a C drive for mostly Windows and a second D drive for everything else? I had in mind 1/3 of a 500Gb as C and the remainder for D.

It depends how you are using the partitions. A primary advantage of keeping your OS on it's own partition is if the other "data" partition has the potential of running out of space faster than the OS partition. If the OS's primary partition runs out of space it may result in a crash or inability to login etc.

tinmar49 said:

Is there any advantage in keeping an SSD partitioned into a C drive for mostly Windows and a second D drive for everything else? I had in mind 1/3 of a 500Gb as C and the remainder for D.

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I partitioned my 500GB SSD.





1st part for Windows.
2nd part for downloads
3rd part for my page file.

Any modern computer allows you to connect multiple SSDs. It is easier to buy another one, nowadays it is inexpensive.
You know of course that if you fill the SSD disk more than 70-80 percent the speed is very slow.

Partition my drives in to 2 - c drive (80-100GB) and a data partition. Move the user folders (Documents, Music, Video, Downloads, Desktop) to the data drive.

Makes it easier to backup just the user data (a single drive letter rather than a user account path) using a native format backup (like SyncBackfree).

And still do Macrium/AOMEI Backupper images on the whole disk.

I wondered if there might be any problems with trimming or the like which is different to defragging a mechanical disc.

tinmar49 said:

I wondered if there might be any problems with trimming or the like which is different to defragging a mechanical disc.

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The individual partitions get optimized. Not an issue.

NavyLCDR said:

The individual partitions get optimized. Not an issue.

View attachment 44881

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Agreed - anything to do with SSD's etc -- just let Windows handle it. Not really sure whether modern SSD's and NVMEs need anything doing to them anyway.

Sometimes partitioning is OK -- if you want to boot more than one build of Windows or boot into Linux. Usually apart from a small EFI partition you won't need to partition an SSD / NVme device.

I've loads of older SSD's which are serveral years old and are often switched from computer to computer and regularly re-formatted with NTFS, then wiped and re-formatted with XFS (a Linux file system) etc. Not a single failure. Modern SSD type devices are very robust and I doubt whether any "User tanpering" would show even a smidgen of performance improvement than just letting Windows get on with it.

Before someone suggests Linux can read / write NTFS -- I know -- but I often use these drives for testing out new versions of Windows / and / Or Linux systems and builds. Linux won't boot from an NTFS or FAT32 partition although with EFI it can boot from a small EFI FAT32 partition which is needed for Windows anyway. Even quite modern machines won't boot EFI from an NTFS partition.

Cheers
jimbo

abactuon said:

Any modern computer allows you to connect multiple SSDs. It is easier to buy another one, nowadays it is inexpensive.
You know of course that if you fill the SSD disk more than 70-80 percent the speed is very slow.

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You know of course, that that is pure garbage these days about filling more than 70-80%.
You can easily go up to 90% these days as drives have much more capacity. You need to leave some room for temporary files.

Also many laptops do not allow multiple drives.

Hi there

@abactuon

Do you actually understand the principle of SSD's - apart from the fact there's no rotational delay and physical arm movement to move backwards and forwards to access the data such as on a classical Spinner HDD.

The data is essentially stored on the device as a "2 dimensional array" rather like map co-ordinates so any data address has the same access time as any other one -- wherever physically located on the SSD. The only "Time" required is to bring the data into the disk I/O controller / cache and then to your application and that depends purely on the size of the data and speed of the hardware - not where it's located on the SSD.

On a Full or busy HDD the data arm can be moving so much of the time that nothing gets done and the computer seems locked -- that's known as thrashing and can occur if the computers RAM is too small for the tasks it has to do.

OK a bit simplistic but in general that also shows that things like defragging SSD's are a 100% waste of time. (Another issue of course).

It's true that if the device gets full and windows / other applications can't obtain the temporary storage required to continue operating then all sorts of things --usually nasty-- can happen -- but that's another totally separate issue.

Cheers
jimbo

abactuon said:

Any modern computer allows you to connect multiple SSDs. It is easier to buy another one, nowadays it is inexpensive.
You know of course that if you fill the SSD disk more than 70-80 percent the speed is very slow.

Click to expand...

Right in most cases, but, not quite so straightforward if the board is an AMD B450 and you want to use M.2 drives. To use a second M.2, I had to buy a pci express card to hold the second M2. Actually it is an Asus Hyper M.2 X16 card V2 which is really intended to run raid with up to 4 M.2 SSD's. One bonus feature using it was a 50% speed increase using AS-SSD, as the board doesn't have the latest NVME interface speed.
By the way, I successfully partitioned the drive that has C on it to 260Gb and E which has 670Gb, a bigger drive than I had initially intended to use.