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Windows on dedicated SSD?

TheJohn
By TheJohn
in Windows
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Posted

Hi,

 

What is the best practice, to install Windows on a dedicated SSD or on the same SSD with all the other programs/games/etc? If it's on the same SSD with all the others should be made a dedicated partition?

 

Thanks!

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Having other applications on the same drive/partition as Windows makes no difference. 

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10 minutes ago, TheJohn said:

Hi,

 

What is the best practice, to install Windows on a dedicated SSD or on the same SSD with all the other programs/games/etc? If it's on the same SSD with all the others should be made a dedicated partition?

 

Thanks!

If you're using a single SSD for a normal basic/gaming system, I wouldn't use any partitioning or such.

 

Back in the day, people would do 'short stroking' to maximize performance of their boot HDD. Your only concern with an SSD would be if you had a specific application/feature that you're worried about filling the drive, like something that takes logs. In this scenario, having a reasonably sized partition or separate drive would be beneficial so that the machine doesn't get functionally 'taken down' when the boot disk fills.

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8 minutes ago, TheJohn said:

Hi,

 

What is the best practice, to install Windows on a dedicated SSD or on the same SSD with all the other programs/games/etc? If it's on the same SSD with all the others should be made a dedicated partition?

 

Thanks!

You're going to get both opinions, FYI.

 

I have found no discernable difference in either way in my use.

"Do what makes the experience better" - in regards to PCs and Life itself.

 

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About the only place putting your OS on a separate drive could make a noticeable difference is with some heavy productivity applications that are sensitive to drive IO, like with video editing, where you need as much IO time as possible dedicated to the video clips themselves and not towards whatever Windows is doing in the background. Otherwise, having everything on a single SSD is fine.

 

SSD partitions are nearly useless unless dual-booting. They don't actually do anything anymore. With HDDs, a partition was actually respected by the drive itself (at least with older drives, newer firmware on HDDs today might not respect partitions either - I haven't looked into the HDD space on this recently) so when you partitioned off 100GB for the OS at the start of the drive, it would use only the first 100GB of the drive.

 

With an SSD, it completely ignores the partitions when it comes time to actually store data. Data on a SSD is stored evenly across all the NAND flash by design - respecting partitions would actually harm the drive's longevity.

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