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New Windows install - How should I organize SSD, HDD, user folders?

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4wd:
FWIW, over at Xtreme Systems they're doing accelerated endurance, (ie. continuous write/read), testing of a few SSDs.

SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

They got over 6PiB of writes from a 256GB Samsung 830, (post #5393), before it died - I'm guessing that under normal circumstances it will last quite a few years.

It was on continuously for 3775 hours and died after a power cycle, (post #5400), 70% of its spare blocks were still free.

ADDENDUM: For some reason the links to the specific posts just took you to the last page so I've removed them and added the thread post numbers.

f0dder:
I wouldn't worry about partitioning the SSD though. SSDs don't suffer from fragmentation like HDDs, so you have no worries there-Renegade (December 28, 2012, 06:12 PM)
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Fragmentation does reduce performance on SSDs - not nearly as much as on a HDD, but we're still talking significant performance drops. Like, a 240gig Intel-520 that drops from ~512MB/s sequential read to ~25MB/s 4k-random. Such massive drops would obviously require heavily fragmented files, though :)

I wouldn't defragment an SSD, though. Perhaps defragmenting single heavily-fragmented files (SysInternals' contig.exe is nice). If the entire filesystem ended up heavily fragmented (and  performance measuring indicated it needed defragmenting), I would make an image, defrag the image, and transfer it back (caveat: this might mess up the wear allocation stuff unless you happen to find an imaging program that can do something intelligent with the SSD TRIM command. I haven't had the need for filesystem defrag, so I haven't done the research.)

4wd: thanks for the link, lots of data there :). It's scary how the drivers tend to just... die. I wonder if there's a lot of stress on electronics during a power cycle, and whether that's a more likely death cause than wearing out the NAND cells, at least for non-heavy use?

4wd:
4wd: thanks for the link, lots of data there :).-f0dder (December 28, 2012, 06:52 PM)
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I changed it to add post numbers since the links didn't work properly.

Buy Samsung  :P

I wonder if there's a lot of stress on electronics during a power cycle, and whether that's a more likely death cause than wearing out the NAND cells, at least for non-heavy use?
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Most of my electronic stuff has died at power on over the years - there may have been a slight deterioration of performance, (maybe a bit of snow in the TV picture, PSU gone out of spec, etc), but it always seems to be at power on when something has permanently failed.  Being powered on for hours at a time causes component wear, (electrolytics may "dry" out, resistors increase resistance, etc), and repeated power on/off, (with attendant heat/cool cycle), pushes them along to being marginal, so voltages may start creeping up, etc - then at the next power on you have inrush current which is over what the device normally uses and...bang!

Turn it on, leave it on - probably the best way to achieve longevity.

TucknDar:
I've got my home workstation SSD split in a ~64gig partition for Windows + most applications, and a ~47gig for my documents, sourcecode, et cetera. Makes OS reinstall a bit easier, but with a small SSD micro-managing free space can be annoying. Games and "bulk" data goes on a 300gig (well, 279gig in non-SI units :)).-f0dder (December 28, 2012, 05:54 PM)
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Hadn't thought of partitioning the SDD. Did you symlink the documents from the system partition, or just use a custom documents folder?

I guess my main concern would be the AppData folder, which I hope to contain within reasonable size, and I'm leaning towards custom My [stuff] folders and add these to the corresponding libraries.

Backup is certainly one reason why I'm looking to get this right from the start, but also to have a fairly good overview over my files. My current system is a mess, and I really don't want to end up with this mess again. I'll probably go with one of the suggested backup procedures found in a few threads on here (Clean System image, System + important software image, monthly system image, daily important file backup to cloud).

Thanks for some good advice, folks :)

Carol Haynes:
Can I add a question to this ...

I am using an APC UPS to protect my system but the APC software requires having hibernation enabled to work. The free version of the software doesn't come with the ability to use command lines when the UPS is triggered - otherwise I could simply do a force shutdown.

Anyone any idea how to move the hibernation file off the C: drive?

I have managed to reduce the footprint of the hiberfil.sys but it is still 50% of system memory which wastes a lot of space on an SSD.

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