Dual booting Win7 pro 64 on a SSD drive

I was wondering if there are any issue with dual booting Windows 7 pro 64 bit on an internal SSD drive. I currently have Windows 7 pro 64 bit on a 500gb 7200 hard drive plus a backup 1 TB 7200 rpm drive; but I wanted the speed I would get by installing win7 pro 64bit on a 250gb SSD drive. I would basically only install specific essential software like Adobe Premeire Pro and Photoshop, among others. I originally was going to use the SDD drive as a scratch disc but after reading, I thought it might be better to just install Win7 on the SSD drive. This way I could also experiment with what would be the best configuration. I still get confused about scratch disc and how useful they are if you have plenty of memory. thanks for any input.

I'm not aware of any reason why you should have any problems dual booting from an SSD. By "scratch" disk do you mean a pagefile? If so - this would also be best created on the SSD.

I absolutely recommend to put the OS on the SSD. And leave all system files on the SSD. Just get rid of the hiberfile (the command is powercfg - h off) and reduce the pagefile to 2GBs. And if you got SP1 via the update cycle, delete the backup files. The command is DISM /online /Cleanup-Image /SpSuperseded. All this together saves you about 18GB of SSD space (assuming 8GB of RAM).

I have made a little tutorial that explains the steps to move the OS to the SSD: SSD - Install and transfer the Operating System - Windows 7 Forums

In photoshop and Premiere it is recommend to assign a scratch disc to an external drive for temporary files. I still struggle with this concept. Since I will install another Win7 pro 64 on the SSD drive; I will not use a scratch disc when booting from the SSD drive.. I would see no reason to have a scratch disc from a hard drive that is slower. My system has an i5 sandy bridge processor with 16gb of memory and a GTX 570 2560mb video card. I am going to order the Corsair Force Series GT CSSD-F240GBGT-BK 2.5" 240GB SATA III. I have the Biostar TZ77B LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s, so this SSD drive should be pretty fast with native Sata III.

The main reason why it is recommended to have the scratch disk on another drive is to avoid the contention for the disk between software and data transfers if they were on the same drive. On a standard hdd seek time and read time for data transfers will slow down the reading and loading of any software modules. On an SSD I would imagine the impact of this would be so significantly reduced so as probably to be un-noticeable.

I ended up buying the Corsair 240 gb Force GT Sata 3. It is impressive how fast it is but it is not up to its full potential. It hovers around 300 sequential reads/writes MB/s. I was reading that you should set up for ACHI but people seemed to be having problems if they convert it to ACHI after installing. Since it is my son's video computer and he makes money off it, I was leary to change anything. I decided to settle for it going about 3 times faster than a hard drive. It is definitely noticeable. I don't know if ACHI works when you have a SSD drive and regular hard drives. I may put together another computer and just use SSD drives with ACHI. Setting up 2 drives to boot on Win7 seems to work out OK. Although, when reviewing specs on this SSD drives, it doesn't seem to live up to it's 555 MB/s: Charts, benchmarks SSD Charts 2011, AS-SSD Sequential Read

As a matter of interest whs, how did you settle on 2GB for pagefile?

I have reduced mine to 500MB. 2GB seems overkill for most 8GB systems, unless you run a lot of memory intensive stuff and expect to run out of RAM, in which case 2GB might not be enough!

I think Adobe Premiere is still a 32-bit app, so limited to 2GB RAM, so 8GB available memory should probably be enough, but he may need to suck it and see.

Originally Posted by Jong

As a matter of interest whs, how did you settle on 2GB for pagefile?

I have reduced mine to 500MB. 2GB seems overkill for most 8GB systems, unless you run a lot of memory intensive stuff and expect to run out of RAM, in which case 2GB might not be enough!

I think Adobe Premiere is still a 32-bit app, so limited to 2GB RAM, so 8GB available memory should probably be enough, but he may need to suck it and see.

No special reason. 2GB always seemed to work. I also have some 4 and 6Gb systems with SSDs. So I settled for that. It is probably a conservative number. I am sure less pagefile will work too - in most cases.

It is my understanding that Premiere Pro CS5 is 64bit only. I know you can't install it in Windows XP. As far as transferring, I personally like to reinstall it and start with a clean fresh copy. On the SSD, it only took about 10 minutes to install it. Of course, all the other stuff takes time but I planned to just have minimal apps on it. It's no big deal for me to reinstall it. And I slipped streamed Win7 service pack 1 which saves time.

Thanks for clarifying. In that case I imagine it could use a lot of memory depending on the workload. If it were me I'd stick with the default pagefile (on the SSD) and keep an eye on RAM usage before I reduced it. If there is anything that can usefully use almost as much memory as you can throw at it it's video processing!