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I was wondering if this SSD supported garbage collection. I'm planning on moving my Windows XP Pro SP3 (32-bit) installation to an SSD using something like MiniTool Partition Wizard to clone it with the partitions properly aligned while leaving ~18GB of unpartitioned free space (according to one of the responses here).

If it supports garbage collection then I can just disable defragging and maybe stuff like prefetch, hibernation, indexing, and/or pagefile (as well as keeping the HDD installed and having temp files moved to it) and not worry about having to manually TRIM it, right?

Will I be able to align the partitions properly using Partition Wizard in XP or is proper alignment when cloning dependent on the OS?

Thanks.

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I don't think Mini Tool Partition Wizard is all you need for what you want to do. It's a useful tool, and I have it here. I'm currently engaged in an exercise to clone a Win10 system to SSD. The SSD came out of a failed desktop, and had already been the target of cloning and partitioning. I could use Mini Tool to delete the existing partitions to make one large unoccupied volume. The SSD came with a license for a version of Acronis True Image which was what I used to partition the SSD and clone Windows to it on the old box. I'm simply trying to repeat what I did last time, and first, I had to clear off the SSD. To actually clone your system to SSD you'll need something like Acronis, Macrium Reflect, or Clonezilla.

But note that defrag is meaningless on SSDs. It's only actually useful on spinning platter HDs, where having things contiguous speeds disk access. Disks read ahead when access is requested, and you want the next stuff to be read to be near where the last stuff was.

On an SSD, it's NAND flash memory, and any place on the SSD can be accessed in the same amount of time, so contiguous simply doesn't matter. You don't want defrag turned on for the SSD. You do want TRIM enabled. (On Win10, defrag on an SSD simply runs TRIM, and doesn't try to move content around.)

Whether to have a page file largely depends on how much installed RAM you have. Windows will let you specify a small page file, but makes it hard to not have one. On my Win10 desktop, I have page file size manually managed, with minimum and maximum sizes. The machine has 8GB RAM, and the page file doesn't need to be all that large. A page file is certainly something I would locate on SSD.

If your concern is minimizing writes to the SSD to extend drive life, don't worry about it. The nature of NAND flash it that there is a limit of about 10,000 writes to a cell, after which is becomes unusable. But the drive firmware tries to spread writes evenly over the entire drive, and the drive is over provisioned with spare cells. As cells reach the point of becoming unusable, data is migrated off them to spare cells, and the failed cell is marked bad, like a bad block on an HD. How long do you think it will take for any particular cell to be written to 10,000 times? You will upgrade the entire system long before you will even notice drive wear.

Update: I note you have XP up and running on the SSD. A System Managed page file is fine, and having it on the SSD is the way to go.

I'd recommend bringing RAM to 4GB. I saw a performance boost when I did it on my XP system. For technical reasons, 32bit Windows can only use about 3.3GB of it, but I found a freeware RAMdisk program that could use the RAM Windows couldn't see, and had a 768MB RAMdisk as Z:. I put things like my Firefox cache on it, since FF will let you specify where to put the cache. Worked fine and sped things up. If the system crashed I'd lose the cache, but I have fast broadband and didn't care. (I got Google Chrome to do it to, but that took system level hacking with symlinks.)

Incidentally, thanks for making me look again at Mini Tool. I completely missed the Clone to SSD wizard, and had I seen it, I would have been up and running on SSD here a while back. Nothing like discovering a tool you already had could do what you needed... :-p

>Dennis

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  • Thanks for the answer. Right now I have the SSD installed in the machine and it seems to work fine. Partition Wizard cloned and aligned the drive just fine. I have 2GB of DDR2 RAM (not including the 768MB of video memory) and I only disabled prefetch and scheduled defrag. There's still indexing and pagefile is set to "System Managed Size" (I think that's what it's called).
    – Pete
    Oct 10, 2017 at 0:36

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