Win7 Pro Q's

R

rjb

New Member
I'm about to start building a new PC and have a couple of Win7 Pro questions:

a) How much disk space does a full, clean install require?

b) Would I see any tangible benefit from installing Win7 Pro on a solid state disk drive (and keeping it just for the os) and having all my app's on a normal HD or would I just be wasting money?
 
First question: 32-bit versions = 16GB, 64-bit versions = 20GB.

Second question: Yes it's worth it to have SSD for OS only and regular hard drive for apps and other stuff.
 
Thanks for the reply (it will be the 64bit version of W7).

Now I've been doing some more searching and have another question - it seems that certain features will be disabled:
"When a solid state drive is present, Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching."
Now, will this be a blanket disablement or will it disable these features just for the SSD and leave my application/data HD's with these features enabled?

It seems like having the OS on the SSD will reduce boot time to sub 10 seconds which is great, but what is the boot time like for W7 Pro on a standard (7200rpm) HD?
 
rjb said:
Thanks for the reply (it will be the 64bit version of W7).

Now I've been doing some more searching and have another question - it seems that certain features will be disabled:
"When a solid state drive is present, Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching."
Now, will this be a blanket disablement or will it disable these features just for the SSD and leave my application/data HD's with these features enabled?

It seems like having the OS on the SSD will reduce boot time to sub 10 seconds which is great, but what is the boot time like for W7 Pro on a standard (7200rpm) HD?
Click to expand...

For the first question i'm not really familiar with that, wait for other replies from other members here.

For the second question it boots pretty fast. My hard drive is 7200rpm and it's pretty fast at booting.
 
IMO, you're better off with a decent RAID array at this point. SSD's aren't cost effective at all yet, and they suffer from pretty drastic slowdowns over time because of fragmentation. This requires a reinstall to fix since they can't be defragged.

The lack of superfetch and prefetching isn't good either. That's there to slow down the fragmentation, not speed the system up.

A good RAID array with 3-4 drives will cost the same, have most of the performance, and have 5-10 times more storage space. Samsung's Spinpoint F3 moseld and WD's Caviar Black models are excellent candidates for RAID usage.

I'd go for as many of the 500GB Spinpoint F3's as you think you need. They're $50 apiece and outperform every other hard drive in the price range, as well as most of the more expensive drives.
 
Last edited:
Drenlin said:
IMO, you're better off with a decent RAID array at this point. SSD's aren't cost effective at all yet, and they suffer from pretty drastic slowdowns over time because of fragmentation. This requires a reinstall to fix since they can't be defragged.

The lack of superfetch and prefetching isn't good either. That's there to slow down the fragmentation, not speed the system up.

A good RAID array with 3-4 drives will cost the same, have most of the performance, and have 5-10 times more storage space. Samsung's Spinpoint F3 moseld and WD's Caviar Black models are excellent candidates for RAID usage.

I'd go for as many of the 500GB Spinpoint F3's as you think you need. They're $50 apiece and outperform every other hard drive in the price range, as well as most of the more expensive drives.
Click to expand...

Or, you can just use a 3rd party defragger and avoid the problem altogether. :)
 
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