I bought a Samsung SSD 840 EVO (sATA-3) to put in my laptop (sATA 2), and the HDD will go into a sATA caddy replacing the DVD Drive. My current HDD is split into 3 partitions: C: 10GB (WinXP) D: 30GB (Win7) E: 258GB (My Junk) I was considering the following configuration for SDD+HDD: SSD C: 60GB (Win7) SSD D: 60GB (Win8.1) HDD E: 298GB (My Junk) My doubt is if partitioning the SSD will do more harm than good. I'll use one OS as main and that means 60GB will have more wear and tear, but it also means I'll have another 60GB which will remain in good health. Is this right or is there a flaw in my devious plan?
AFAIK, there isn't any penalty for partitioning a SSD any way you want. The only flaw I detect is putting Win8.1 on a 60GB partition. It won't leave much free space.
Following Mutagen suggestion, I will leave that SSD partitioned like this: SSD C: 40GB (Win7) SSD D: 80GB (Win8.1) HDD E: 298GB (My Junk) Being Win8.x known for a resources consumer better to leave a large partition for it.
Thanks for all the input. Quite right smlm17, I'm buying the SSD for a speed boost, all my files will be on the HDD My main OS is Win7, Win8.1 will be there just in case I decide to try something exclusively for 8.1 or if Win7 fails to boot, I'm keyboard friendly so Win8.1 doesn't fit my needs. Currently I have 5.5GB free out of 30GB, and since I don't even play games, 60GB will be more than enough What about pagefile.sys? Should I move it to the HDD or disable it all together? I'm using Win7 Pro 64bit with 4GB RAM. My previous laptop was a Pentium M with 2GB RAM and I had pagefile.sys disabled, but sometimes I used to ran out of memory, mostly because of too many open browsers/tabs and/or Virtual PC.
AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro has always worked wonders for me. Move and resize partitions without data loss. Great for making adjustments after-the-fact if your initial layout isn't to your liking.
A small pagefile.sys (something like min. 200MB & max. 800MB) in the SSD would be the best bet IMO. Depending on the amount of RAM you have, it will be scarcely used. Also, Samsung Magician deserves a try, it's a good software.
Well, just added the SSD. It was a pain in the neck to make it work. Failed boots, wrong letters, wrong active disk, etc. Thankfully I had a working laptop to search for solutions for each problem. Had to fix boot with bcdedit, then remove active flag from HDD, then fix wrong Windows 7 boot letter (F: instead of C: ), then reorganize all drive letters, then delete old WinXP and Win7 partitions and extended my partition to the entire disk. Finally all is working, Windows 7 is definitely faster! So I picked up the DVD that came with the SSD to install the Samsung Magician, and... I removed the DVD drive! Dah! Oh well, I downloaded it from Samsung and configured the OS to maximum performance. All done!