SSD Size for Windows

John from PA wrote in post #19126257
It’s here... https://outlet.us.dell​.com …2&l=en&s=dfh&br​andid=2202

But once at that site, in the “Model” field, pick the XPS 8930 at the bottom of the drop down list. Then pick the one with the green circle reading 72 hour sale. Then three versions are shown, the one at about $900 seems to be the match.

By the time you add 2 M.2 drives, upgrade to Gen10 proc, add a 6tb spinning drive and 16g memory, your pretty much over 1.3k anyway. For $900 is not a bad machine, but it's not really comparable to Sam's either.

I sort of went though the same though process as building a machine really doesn't save you a lot these days, but it does get you exactly what you want and generally gets you higher quality components. I'm not sure who Dell sources their MBs from but in the past, their less expensive PCs seemed to have some generic parts in there.

the one I was looking at is 16 gig of ram

JimClark wrote in post #19126283
the one I was looking at is 16 gig of ram

I know, that's why I said that if you want to compare apples to apples (not the brand ) you have to add a few bucks to upgrade from a gen9 i7 to a gen10 i7 which also will change your MB as well. Then add in 2 1tb M2 drives and a 6tb spinning drive and an additional 16g of memory. By the time those are added, it's no longer a sub 1k machine but 1.5k++.

JimClark wrote in post #19126283
the one I was looking at is 16 gig of ram

You probably have a single 16GB ram card in the potential machine. To bump it to 32GB would cost you anywhere from about $60 (probably similar to what you have) to $500 (gaming quality).

Personally if you get the machine you are thinking about, I’d wait until it is in hand and see how it performs. You can also verify if only uses a single 16GB as opposed to 2 x 8GB cards. Dell, like any of these manufacturers, does reserve the right to change the specification. I doubt that is likely with a refurb, but one never knows. FYI, I purchased a Dell refurb laptop many years ago. It essentially was new in appearance but did have one profile set up which I removed. It came with so many accessories, not ordered, that I thought they shipped me the wrong order. When I called them they said that since it was the last unit, they gave me the accessories! It came with an extra drive bay, 3.5 inch drive, chargers, an in-car charger, etc.

See https://www.crucial.co​m …upgrade-for/dell/xps-8930 for your potential memory choices.

I have Windows 7 installed to a 256 Gb SSD drive, along with my most-used programs
such as Adobe's CS6, JASC's ancient Paint Shop Pro, Firefox, Chrome, SpeedFan,
VLC Media Player, Display Fusion Pro, Acrobat X, Microsoft Office 2007, as well
as network monitors, system drivers and others. I have over 100 Gb of free space, even with
Windows' swap file on the drive.

Similar space is used on my 480 Gb SSD drive for Windows 10.
I install, play, then uninstall games from both from time to time,
and the free space isn't shrinking.

Other stuff such as huge-Gb games, as well as my photos and other long-term stuff,
reside on a spinning 2 Tb platter drive. There are now a pair of 6-Tb platter drives
to save images of both my laptops and desktop machine, as well as secondary drives.
These will become a RAID array sometime soon for NAS.

The main laptop now has a 256-Gb mSATA drive for boot/OS/major programs,
with a 1-Tb SATA for secondary, and it's extraordinarily fast as compared to the
spinning-drive storage it used to boot from.

Everyone else has it spot-on: DON'T WASTE MONEY on an OEM storage upgrade!
I saw mention of a $400 premium in moving from a 256Gb drive to a 500Gb drive.
A Samsung 500Gb drive can be had from Amazon right now for US $69.79.
1Tb can be had for roughly US $110. I grabbed a pair from Crucial for laptop
upgrades not long ago.

I had earlier mentioned a utility (MemInfo) that runs in the background and displays in the tray area the used memory and also the size of the paging file. By default in Win 10, and I believe Win 7, the default paging file is set at 1.5X of RAM. So if you have 16GB of RAM, the paging file is set at no less than 24GB. I’d have to check but I think the default maximum is set to 3X RAM.

One benefit of MemInfo is you can watch the RAM useage change as you do you typical workflow. The OP for instance could, with his existing computer, determine a realistic amount of needed RAM, based on his current workflow. The same utility by advising actual pagefile usage, can be used to reduce the allocated space, thus possibly increase available drive space for other purposes.

You can download MemInfo at https://www.carthagoso​ft.net/MemInfo.php. It is very small and easy to uninstall if you decide it isn’t needed.

gjl711 wrote in post #19126240
I do something similar but the OS drive is the fastest drive, (in my PC, it's the M2 drive) You would be surprised at how often the C drive gets touched, it's almost constant. Just bring up the task manager, go to "performance" and select the C drive. Some process is reading or writing almost constantly and the more programs you have open, the more the access. All the other drives get hit only if I load or save something. I have 2 SSDs set up a a RAID0 for my data drives where all my files, music and such sit. Then one 1tb SSD for a video drive where I do all my video editing, then 2 4TB spinning drives also in a RAID0 for picture/scans/video storage. I'm thinking of putting in the second M2 for paging and PS temp file space.

I think it's mostly writing logs and such. Writes are cached in RAM so doesn't really matter if they get written immediately or in 3 seconds. The volume is also very low, less than 1MB/sec which is about 0.25% of an SSDs capacity. Temp files and swap can / do go to that disk, but if you have enough RAM not often used. In your place I wouldn't bother with an M2 for swap and paging, put it on a standard SSD, or just buy more RAM.