Partitioning an SSD

[caracortada_uk]

Hi all,

just a quick one. As per my other thread it looks like my motherboard has died so need to upgrade, as such im treating myself to an SSD

So, i know how to format an HDD, but is there anything i need to do different for an SSD? I just want to make a partition for windows and another for games, files/music/movies/etc will be kept on the HDD. Somebody has said to me to partition "by chips" rather than "across" them. Any easy way to work this out for a 512Gb MX100? I have seen alignment of drives mentioned, but as it will be a fresh install and using Acronis Disk Director i assume this wont be an issue?

Thanks

[Lucio]

Wouldn't worry about a partition on an SSD, on a HDD it's useful to have as it helps seperate information onto seperate platters / sectors of the discs but SSD's can access anywhere in the storage at the same rate. It also gives you the best lifespan for the SSD as the system can use all of the cells, rather than risking that a small partition's worth wears out faster.

[kalniel]

Agreed - partitioning 'by chips' doesn't make any sense. The only reason I'd partition an SSD is for my own organisational reasons or to aid backup image creation. As for aligning 4k blocks etc. don't worry, the OS takes care of all of that for you.

[watercooled]

You can't partition by chips because of the disparity between the logical and physical mapping of the drive, and even if you could it would be a terrible idea because NAND isn't terribly fast and SSDs get a lot of their performance through exploiting parallelism i.e. spreading IO across packages.

Unless there's some management reason to separate your data into partitions e.g. making backups more straightforward, I wouldn't bother at all. As above, HDDs could benefit performance-wise from partitioning for a number of reasons including having performance-sensitive data near the outer edge (start) of the disk for higher throughput, physically closer on the disk to reduce seek time, and keeping types of files isolated to prevent/limit fragmentation. None of this is useful for SSDs.

TL-DR: Just don't worry about it. Make sure the partition is aligned correctly, which it should be anyway if it's formatted with a modern OS. A great deal of the 'SSD optimisation' guides on the net are utter nonsense so don't get put off by them.

[Agent]

It also gives you the best lifespan for the SSD as the system can use all of the cells, rather than risking that a small partition's worth wears out faster.

Partitions will make zero difference to the wear on a SSD. That is done at the firmware level by the device, and all 'blocks' are available to it. The drive just maps the new location internally.

Just to add to what the guys above have said - format it as you'd like and don't worry about anything else, as long as you format it on Windows 7 or above (Vista is also fine, as long as you have the patch for advanced format (4k) from Windows update installed). If you do it on XP, you will end up with a misaligned partition, which is something you don't want.
As for using it - you really want Windows 7 or above. Vista doesn't support the TRIM command, which you really want working on a SSD.

[caracortada_uk]

Thanks for the reply guys. I will partition it just like normal when i install win7pro.