Windows 7 - Patriot 32GB SATA II SSD Solid State Hard

I'm considering ordering the SSD in the title, but two questions pop into my head. First, I read where one person couldn't boot to this drive, because of his older hardware. My rigs are not spring chickens either, so I'm wondering if I would have such a problem booting this drive on them (check specs).

Second, I know that this drive is too small to install anything except an OS, but I have never installed only an OS on a drive/partition before, and thus I don't know that only 32GB is sufficient for the OS plus 2-3 shadow copies for System Restore...yes/no?

EDIT: Are there any apps that really need to be on the OS drive/partition? I am considering putting Opera on it, in hopes of giving it some more speed.

EDIT2: Would the pagefile need to be on the SSD also, or would it be just as good on a regular harddrive?

Personally i would be wary of filling the drive up more than half full as they can start to slow down depending on how much the manufacturer underprovisions them.

Okay, would using it as described fill it over half?

The drive is ample for Windows7. My Windows 7 on the SSD is now about 18GB after 5 months of use and a LOT of programs installed. But my data is in a seperate data partition.

In lieu of restore points (2 or 3 are useless anyhow) I do imaging which is a) much more reliable and you you can do b) the images either to the HDD (very fast) or an external disk. To image my system to the HDD takes less than 4 minutes. I also image the data partition, but at different intervals. There is no need to image either one when no changes have occured.

I keep about 10 images of each around at all times and I rotate the images between the HDD, the external permanently attached disk and an external disk that I only attach when I take an image. That gives me maximum security against disk failures and intruders.

Plus, I always keep the image that I took after the initial installation and setup was completed. That allows me to reinstall the system without having to start all the way from scratch. A reinstallation I do about every 6 to 9 months because by then the system has accumulated a lot of quirks. And rather than chase those, I just reinstall. The pain are the MS updates, but that's the price to pay.

Opera is no faster than IE8 by my observation. But I use it too as alternat browser for certain things.

Regarding the page file, that is not a matter of space but a matter of frequency of use (because write operations supposedly degrade the SSD over time). If you have 3 or 4GBs of RAM, it does not matter where it resides because it will hardly ever be used. What you should delete though is the hibernation file with this command in elevated cmd:

powercfg.exe -h off

That buys you the equivalent of your RAM size. Bottom line: Go for it. SSDs are great.

PS: you can fill the disk up to 85%. If you have 15% of free space, you can execute all operations. I don't know where this 50% rule came from.

Thanks, you covered the full gambit, except my first question. What determines whether a SSD will be bootable or not? I'm not sure, but I imagine that it is whether or not it would be listed as a boot option in the BIOS. A flash drive appears in the group with regular harddrives on my system. Would that be the same with a SSD?

Most likely. I wouldn't touch the drive if it doesn't support TRIM though. It would also be better if it had a SATA 6GB/s interface and your motherboard had the same.

It is not clear whether it supports trim or not The only thing that Ihave found on the subject are customer reviews, and some say yes, some say no. It is difficult to find a definite answer.

What I don't understand is this thing that you call a 6GB interface...what is that, a write cache? What would other hardware have to do with this functioning or not?

EDIT: BTW, this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

explains trim fairly well. I get the impression that it is what permits a SSD to use it's full capacity without slowing down. However, if one never installed any apps on the drive, only the OS alone, I'm wondering how many excess files would be left without trim, if one disabled shadow copies, hibernation and the pagefile? It would seem that the only thing that would change would be the registry, would that be entirely rewritten with each change of the registry, or simply added to as necessary?

EDIT2: I understand the need to retain 15% freespace on a regular harddrive. The majority of that (12%) is needed for defragging, but since SSDs are not defragged, does it still need that space for something else...what?

6GB/s is a new SATA standard, as some SSD's can peak at the current 3GB/s standard. As for TRIM, you need it, as the OS can make sure the drive doesn't slow down with uncleared pages.

I have yet to see an SSD drive in a single configuration that can hit the current 3 gigabit per second SATA standard...that's roughly 385MB/s. SSD's max out around 250-275MB/s

The connector standards are always way ahead of the curve. I mean we used to have ATA 66, then 100 and then 133. Then we had sata 150, and then sata 3.0Gb/s and now we are moving to sata 6.0Gb/s. There are very few mechanical drives which can yet max out the 133 standard at this point. None yet can max out sata 150. And even SSD drives aren't at the 3.0Gb/s area yet.

Additionally, there are only a couple of boards out there that currently integrate Sata III. Doesn't seem logical to hold off on proven performance gains until the latest technology becomes mainstream...