Not really. Most storage vendors play number games when representing the capacity of their drives, so it's not unusual to see a different capacity than you expected. Most of the time this is due to the difference between the base-2 notations that computers use and the base-10 notation that most humans use. Numbers like 128 that are squares of 2 suggest that you're getting a number in
gibibytes instead of gigabytes, which can be misleading. As long as the true capacity is more than enough for your needs, you're good.
120-128 GB (or GiB) looks a little small for something like Windows 7 to me. Technically it can be done, but free space will be tight. Don't forget about the hidden partition. The hidden partition on my laptop is only 100GB, which is smaller than the one that came pre-installed. My C: drive is nearly 200 GiB, which is the smallest that I could shrink it to on my 750GB HD. Microsoft says it'll install, but you may be giving up something that isn't readily apparent. I'd wait until I could buy a SSD twice the capacity, more like 250GB, if I had my druthers.
Linux OTOH will be more than happy with 120GB (or less) of disk.
I think you meant your hidden partition is 100
MB not
GB.
Thanks for the reply, didn't realise that posting in here meant you had to move threads just to help me out.
250GB SSD's are definitely out of my price window. So is it worth waiting for the prices to go down, or just get a 120GB?
Obviously you said to wait, but would the free space on a 120GB be that tight? I don't even know how big Win7 is tbh...
I successfully ran Window 7 off of a 60 GB SSD - the trick is to move all non-essential folders off the SSD - stuff like My Documents, My Pictures, etc.
With my setup, I have my new 180 GB SSD (Intel Cherryville 520 SATA III) as my OS drive, my older 80 GB (Intel X25-M G2 SATA 2) set up for all of my profiles, and dual 1 TB (Seagate Barracuda 7200.12) drives for storage.
Even before my incorporation of SSDs, I always kept data separate from my OS drive, so in Windows 7 I would always move the 'special' folders from the default location to another mechanical drive.
When I got the 80 GB SSD a few years back, I revamped the installation. I used
Profile Relocator to relocate the
entire user tree over to one of the mechanical drives, to save space on the 80 GB.
When I bought the 180 GB drive a couple of months ago, I revamped it again. I installed Win7, used ProfileRelocator to move the user tree to the old 80 GB drive, and set up the page file on both SSDs
only. I then again manually moved the special folders to the mechanical drives to have ready access to all of my documents, photos, videos, etc.
Now, all of the cache related stuff is on the 80 GB drive, the main OS files and all programs on the 180, and all data on either of the 1 TB drives.
(I've actually toyed with combining the 2 TB drives into a RAID, since I really don't want to lose my data, and neither drive is more than 25% full, but have not found the time to incorporate the idea yet).
My /windows directory alone is 22 GB, pagefile is 12GB, hiberfil.sys is 10GB.
So that's ~44GB right there and doesn't include some other basic stuff.
Granted your page and hiberfile/pagefile may be much smaller depending on your RAM. But I think assuming ~40-50GB for Windows is an ok approximation.
120GB is do-able, IMO, just tight.
That's about right. I have 12 GB of RAM, but I made my pagefile 12 GB on
both SSDs, just to stagger it a bit.
I think I might do it. I mean, how long till 250GB SSD's are less than
.
