It's actually not that bad. What's bad is if you consider you only consider one drive to put everything on.

Quite commonly different partitions/drives would split the job of the OS, so you have your basic OS, your user files, a boot partition, main GUI, etc. This means you can upgrade one part or completely redo it without touching the rest of your files, or backing up one small important portion becomes easier. Much easier if that small portion is on a completely separate drive.

M$ and Windows by default try to force you to use a single drive for everything, naturally with their reliance on the registry, fully installed games/programs become pointless without those entries properly installed. Not so with Unix/Linux based systems.

Honestly a base OS can be as small as a few hundred megabytes, or with GNU/Linux combined with busybox, a few megabytes. There's a full minimal OS for a Linux BIOS i've seen, boots in like 2 seconds. Looked pretty cool.

40 Gigs today is a little small, but as long as you aren't shoving huge amounts of multi-media, or HD content, or the newest games that require huge amounts of space, you're fine. I remember working with 6Gigs of space for years... wasn't fun, mostly because i could only have D2 or Morrowind installed, and had to alternate the installs every so often.

I'm not going to argue with the benefit of having modded Oblivion on a SSD!

In my case, though, I couldn't have done it with a 40 gig SSD. My modded Oblivion folder was always over 20 gigs.

I have a 120 Gb SSD and a 1 TB HDD. I don't keep movies or music on my drives, jus games and pics an various documents, spreadsheets, etc. So, 1 TB is not a limitation. I try to keep 40 Gb free on my SSD, so I keep my OS and my daily programs - browsers (like JMich suggests), office programs, etc. -- on the SSD and then I have room for 1 game - Oblivion for a while, Skyrim for a while...

But, I value the responsiveness and low boot time I get from the OS on the SSD.

Depends what you value most.

Cheers!

I wonder if this is already implemented: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/windows-81-will-use-compression-to-fit-on-16gb-devices-508816

That should help SSD users a lot.

I wouldn´t touch that even if they compressed it to 8bits :P

Why not? A fast and simple compression like LZO has almost no speed overhead while giving basic/decent compression. Yeah it won't get maximum compression like LZMA or other formats, but the OS deals with decompression. Especially if it has multiple cores (like any modern system) then one core dedicated to background IO and compression/decompression would make it transparent.

I do recall reading over some NTFS decisions M$ made, one was that the minimum matching size was double normal compression, so while regular algorithms will look for 3+ bytes for matching a LZ77 string, NTFS goes with 4-6. This greatly increases the speed it compresses, although it's not as complete or taking as full advantage as it could of all the possible matches...

Hmm if you don't want the FS to do compression, you could use per file compression UPX (Ultimate Packer for eXecutables) which decompresses files (DLL's, EXE's, COM files, etc) on the fly. Good for files that aren't likely to change.

Not because of the compression algorithm, but because of WHAT is being compressed ;P

So... WHAT IS being compressed?

To me the suggestions of moving/installing programs to a bigger HDD, and keeping only the core OS files on the SSD, kinda defeats the purpose of having a SSD. It is specifically the big games and applications which I'd want to load faster (hence, be installed on the SSD). Also if I copy, move, compress, uncompress etc. gigabytes of files, those are also the cases where I'd want the extra speed, so it means I'd want to use the SSD as a storage place as well (or then waste lots of times moving the files between the HDD and SSD constantly, whenever I want to operate with them).

How much does it help anyway that the OS only is on the SSD? Windows loads faster when you power on your PC? I can wait, I don't power up my PC more than once a day anyway, usually.

Hence, I still use only HDDs, just to be able to use bigger hard drives at an affordable price. Let's get back to this when SSDs get bigger than what they are now, and cost much less.

To me it feels that we have moved back in time. Modern PCs with SSDs, and especially "tablet PCs" with 16-32GB flash drives, have much less storage place than what I'm used to with HDD equipped PCs. Speed of the hard drive was rarely an issue for me, the size of them was. Depends on the usage of course, on PCs which I use only for work, even a smaller hard drive is fine.

If it was merely boot time i'd agree with you. But no, with Windows and OS's the core install being a dozen gigabytes, the improvement in performance is higher than just boot-time. Every program, every DLL, every service, every process it starts would be faster. In all honesty i'd like to run a minimal version of the OS on a ramdisk (not including eye-candy), which would then be super fast. I've heard quite a few people enjoy making a Ramdrive just to house their temporary files.

I also enjoy faster performance, but usually i create a 0.5-2.0Gig Ramdrive and copy the whole game to the Ramdrive, then run it from there. Torchlight loads much faster. I also don't have to worry about it doing dozens of tiny reads for dozens of tiny unrelated files and locations. For games beyond a certain size the Ramdisk doesn't offer the same benefits (unfortunately). Partially because movie files play at one speed and are in a single chunk, but also that ram has a specific maximum on your computer. Mine is 16 Gigs, quite more than enough to completely remove Virtual Memory, which in itself is a big speed boost.

40gb seem incredible tiny.. no idea if thats possible with any windows :|

--

ive managed to ditch all hdd's in favor of ssd's. I had incredible noisy hdd's before, so ssd's solved that for me as bonus.

ill probably get my self external NAS at somepoint with actualy storage drives. Or not. cloud storages might actually be enough for my needs atm.

The memory management from Vista onwards is better, especially since the OS caches files it believes will be used soon. So a DLL that is called every 5 minutes will more often than not be read from memory, not disk. With 12 or 16 GB of RAM, it's unlikely that cached memory will be freed so it can be used by programs, though not impossible.

And yes, RAMDrives are excellent :)

windows xp and 2000 sure
windows vista and 7 32 bit absolutey

windows 7 and vista 64 bit however ? well thats why i created this thread

NOT excellent!

Definitely Awesome!!!

I have just bought a SSD and it is a charm. Mine is 120 GB which has more than enough space for OS + apps. Since you are so limited with space, I would disable everyring useless in C: (pagefile {move it to another drive if you want to keep it}), system restore and all that windows stuff. If you keep you OS and your few must used applications, it should fit. I am reinstalling right now and Windows (8.1) updated plus a few apps takes 20 GB. A litttle tight (remember that some empty space is good for the drive {at least for HDD's, must adapt to this new device}), but you can even move the default documents path to other drive, so you don't waste space with the documents windows creates for you in the default folder.