Win7 size concerns, SSDs

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entropism

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I'm currently looking at swapping over to an SSD for my boot drive, but I have concerns over the size of my Win7 install. I see people saying that Win7 and all their programs can easily fit on a 30GB SSD, but I'm just not seeing it. Right now my boot drive is taking up 43GB, and I'm trying to see what I can do to slim that down.

I'm running 7 Ultimate, x64. I know Windows set my system is set up for an 8GB page file, and for some reason my user profile takes up nearly 1.5GB. I can ditch Photoshop if I HAVE to, but I'd prefer to keep that 2GB around. Looking over the rest of my programs to uninstall, I'm seeing MAYBE an extra 600mb I can ditch, still nowhere near getting my install onto a 40GB SSD, and probably barely touching a 60GB considering you have to leave some space left over.

Anyone out there willing to lend some advice as to what the heck is taking up so much space here?

Edit: Seems like system restore is also set to take up 10GB. Is there any way I could set system restore to use my storage drive for these backups? I'd have no issue dumping it and going with Acronis (or another company), but True Image's automatic backups never worked properly for me in the past.
 
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I'm pretty sure that System Restore scales itself based on your hard disk size. You're using 10GB because Win7 said "hey, I've got all this hard disk space, might as well use it for something!"
 
I just installed win 7 enterprise onto my test server with a 40gb X25-V. As it sits right now with essentially only MSE installed it's sitting at 12.8GB used, 24.3GB free (37.1GB stated capacity)
 
Yeah, I figured as much, especially since I'm on a 320GB boot drive. As long as you're running backup software to store system images on an external drive, system restore is pretty much useless, correct? I've already lowered System Restore to 5GB, haven't shut it off complely yet.

Page file would be safe to lower to 4GB if I'm running 8GB of RAM, I assume? I've heard of things potentially going wonky if you eliminate it entirely, so I have no problem keeping SOMETHING there.

Also, side note, how's the backup software included in Win7 as compared to say, Acronis True Image and the competition?

As of right now, I assume that if I pick up a 64GB SSD, you could get 55GB of formatted space, and you want to keep the partition down to 45GB. This is definitely tight, but workable.

I was looking into the older G1 Intel 80GB drives, and I have a basic understanding of TRIM, but what would be the maintenance procedures for a drive without it? I tried searching, but basically people are saying to image your drive, wipe it completely, then re-image? Sounds like a complete PITA, but nobody is saying how often you'd have to do this. if it's every year, fine, but every week, forget about it.
 
I always turn System Restore as low as it will go. On XP, it'll go down to 200MB. On my new Win7 install, it seems it'll only go down to 1% (which is 600MB on my 60GB partition). System Restore is a nice way to be able to back off a change if something screws up (like a bad driver update), but I personally don't need multiple gigabytes of backups for rolling back.

Essentially, if you have enough RAM, you don't need a pagefile. However, some apps do require one, and it basically won't hurt anything to have one there. With 6GB of RAM, I've lowered my swapfile down to a static 1GB.

My new Win7 Pro x64 install, with Firefox and video drivers installed, is 13.7GB, including the default 6GB pagefile (haven't rebooted yet after changing it). I did put my user profiles on a separate partition, which is another ~150MB.

With TRIM, the OS will tell the SSD when data has been deleted, so the controller can erase those blocks. This means they're immediately writable (NAND flash can't be overwritten - you need to cache the existing pages of data, erase the whole block, then write the previous data pages and the new data). Without TRIM, the controller will write to empty blocks first, but as you write and delete things, you'll run out of free blocks eventually. At that point, every write will require the slower cache-erase-rewrite process.

Secure Erase will reset the SSD to like-new condition, but it's a pain like you said. People have reported mixed results with AS Cleaner, but the Intel Toolbox seems to work in a similar way (at least on the surface). It will basically fill up your free space with a file whose contents are equivalent to "erased", then delete the file. Without TRIM, the file's contents remain on the SSD, but they're equal to "erased" so you end up with clean space.

How often you need to do it will depend on how much writing and deleting you're doing. Leaving extra spare area will also give the SSD more "temp" room to work with, which should help fight degradation. I only have TRIM-enabled SSDs, so I can't really give you any actual numbers. Keep in mind that in Anand's testing, a fully degraded SSD was still 8x as fast as a VelociRaptor.
 
Windows 64bit ultimate with 77 programs installed, most installed on another drive, pagefile moved to another drive and backup turned to 2 Gb, = 20.7 GB
 
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