Highly recommended tweaks for freeing up space:

 

With an SSD you want to reduce the amount of writes and there are a few steps to doing that:

 

Step 1 - Disable/move system restore:

 

The first thing you can do is disable system restore or move the system restore files to a different hard drive. Your operating systems will create system restore files every now and then. They can also be rather large. Doing this will free up space and reduce writes.

 

Step 2 - Disable and delete hibernation:

 

The second thing you can do is disabling and also deleting the hibernation feature and file. The hibernation file is at average about 7 GB. If on Windows 8, run CMD as administrator. Type powercfg -h off in the CMD and you will delete the hibernation file and also disable this feature. Hibernation means your OS will write your current session on the SSD when you put it into sleep mode. While this will save you the trouble of losing data upon power loss you still write unnecessary data to your SSD. In contrast, standby (as it is called now) will save your current session on your RAM. This allows for quick startup but if there is a power loss you lose your current session.

 

Step 3 - Move the virtual memory:

 

The third thing you can do is move your virtually memory to a secondary (or another) drive. By default your virtual memory is twice the amount of RAM. So if you have like 16 GB of RAM your virtual memory will be around 32 GB. 

 

So you can imagine what 5GB ish + 7 GB ish + 32 GB ish will do to your free space. On a fresh Windows install you can possibly increase your free space with up to 40 GB depending on your system specifications. In addition, a thing to keep in mind is that an SSD reads faster the lesser data is stored on it. So don't keep it near full. 

 

Highly recommended SSD brands:

 

Samsung and Intel. Kingston is also a good brand.

 

Can't get your SSD to work?

 

Turn off IDE and enable AHCI in BIOS.

 

SATA 1, 2 or 3? PCI-Express?

 

SATA 1 has a max speed of 150 MB/s, SATA 2 a max speed of 300 MB/s and SATA 3 a max speed of 600 MB/s.

 

PCI-E 1, 2, 3 and 4 has an average max speed of 4 GB/s, 8 GB/s, 16 GB/s and 32 GB/s respectively.

 

Which connector you want to use depends on the read and write speeds of your SSD. If it is below 300 MB/s there is no reason to take up SATA3 if you can use it for something else. However, If the SSD's speed exceeds 300 MB/s then SATA3 or higher is recommended to take full advantage of your SSD. The same principle should be applied to PCI-E SSDs.

 

Write speed vs. Read speed?

 

Unless you write massive amounts of data and often then read speed is what you should focus on. You may have noticed that many SSDs are asynchronous in terms of write and read speeds. They can have like 300 MB/s read speed but only 200 MB/s write speed. Don't worry! While write speed is still important for overall performance, read speed should be your priority and the determining factor when purchasing an SSD.

 

What to install on an SSD?

 

To take good advantage of the sheer speed of an SSD, installing the operating systems and programs is a good idea. This allows your OS and programs to startup fast. Should you install games on it? If you have the space and if the game requires it, of course you can! Games like Battlefield 4 will load much faster than a hard drive upon joining a server. Whereas an hard drive can take up to 4 min or more to launch BF4 an SSD can take less than a minute to do the same. 

 

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General concept of what an SSD is:

 

An SSD stands for Solid State Drive and is basically no different from a USB stick and system memory (RAM). What makes SSD and USB sticks different from RAM is that RAM is volatile (loses its data upon no power) whereas the aforementioned do not. An SSD is non-volatile thanks to its NAND type memory modules.

 

SLC, MLC, TLC (Single layer, multi layer, triple layer cell):

 

These three words refer to how many binary numbers  and values (data) each respective cell can hold. TLC is the most cost effective one because it can hold more values per each cell, making it easy for SSD manufacturers to produce SSDs with high storage capacity. However, this also means that each cell will write more than an SLC SSD. So what you gain in storage capacity you lose in number of writes and consequently stability and longevity. 

 

What makes SSD different from a hard drive in the sense of cells is that an SSD needs to rewrite the entire cell even if a single value or piece of data is altered. This is the very reason why you want to reduce the amount of writes as much as possible. A hard drive will instead simply write the altered or added data at the end of the pre-existing data (this is also partially what leads to disk fragmentation).

 

Binary representation:

 

SLC (2 binary values)

 

0

 

1

 

MLC (4 binary values)

 

0

 

1

 

10

 

11

 

TLC (8 binary values)

 

0

 

1

 

10

 

11

 

100

 

101

 

110

 

111

Thanks, I will try some of this when I get the chance, and post here with results.

It works i've tried some of these myself and got some extra space out of it.

All good except for the page file stuff. I think I would prefer having the OS fetch from the SSD page file versus one of my spinners.

I'm running the page file on one of my spinners and i'm actually getting better performance.  The pagefile does too much writing and overwriting.  Now the SSD just does nothing but load applications and games.  My boot times have improved as well.

All good except for the page file stuff. I think I would prefer having the OS fetch from the SSD page file versus one of my spinners.

It's true that an SSD is a lot faster than a hard drive for the virtual memory. But note that it does write to it a lot. The page file really doesn't matter that much if you have a lot of system memory. I have 24 GB of RAM and my virtual memory set to 2048 MB. In all honestly, you really don't want your computer to use your virtual memory. Think of it as a backup memory when you run out of system memory. While you shouldn't completely disable it, you want your PC to use its fastest memory, namely the RAM, as much as possible. And you want to alleviate your primary drive from writing as much as possible.

 

Moving it to another drive is just a means to free up space on your primary storage drive.