Kindly school me on new SSD best practices

Lady Fitzgerald said:

This is the last time so pay attention this time. When you install Win 7 on a freshly formatted drive, it will create two partitions: System Reserved and C:/. Once that has been done, use MiniTool Partition Wizard to shrink the C:/ partition to 120GB (or larger if you use large programs or games). Then format the new unallocated space to form your data partition.

Use AS SSD to check the alignment as I've already described. Also, check to make sure TRIM is enabled. In all probability, they will both be fine but it doesn't hurt to check (and will probably make you sleep better).

You may have to reset Defragmenting to never. Check once a year to make sure defragmentation is below 25%. Otherwise, don't worry about it.

I was referring to many people like to organize their data using partitions which I do not recommend becasue it is an inefficient use of drive space. I wasn't sure if the SSD was the only drive in your computer or not. Since it appears you are, the one data partition will be fine. Don't creat that partition until after you have installed the OS, as I described above.

Thanks. Just out of curiosity, what is the harm in creating the partitions (c: and d: for that matter) upon clean install? Seems much cleaner than using a third party software from inside windows.

After creating the partitions while clean installing Windows 7 I just ran AS SSD and it says that everything is ok. So does the crucial app, so I'm done worrying. Thank you all for your precious time.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Although similar with overlapping functions, overprovisioning is NOT the same as leaving free space. The amount of factory overprovisioning is plenty; it does not need to be changed. The amount of free space--the unused, accessible space, not the overprovisioning--still needs to be at least 20-25%.

The Crucial software will set aside a certain amount of free space. That is what over provisioning is. No different than a partition.

I have a Crucial drive and the software allowed me to over provision by 20 or some odd percent.