[earlyadopter]

Is it worth carving the SSD up into sections and formatting them to FAT32 for better performance?

I've heard that smaller is better for reformatting. So I'm thinking that 8GB for the OS is plenty large, perhaps I should go lower. Applications should be sized for their present use and upgrade?

Or, should I seal the card in acrylic and make a paperweight of it, and purchase the shiny new $219 card I constantly see at the top of the screen? Should I muddle along and wait for a competitor?

[Fanfoot]

Personally I'm still waiting for my RunCore drive to come in. If you haven't ordered one already, I would wait and see what people think once they get them. I expect the performance to be substantially better, but you never know.

It looks like there is SOME performance degradation with FAT32 as the drives get larger, since the cluster sizes increase and the amount of I/O that has to be done to determine free space goes up. How this would translate to real world performance on a slow flash SSD I'm not clear. Perhaps others have some real world experience to offer here.

Presumably it wouldn't be too burdensome to format the drive as TWO logical 32GB drives, and manage the allocations as program and data storage for a while if you're worried about it.

[Zaden]

Yes indeed it is best to format to FAT32. I Ran HD TUNE on the default dell hard drive and the one 64GB MDD. Over all the Stec dell default hard drive is twice as fast. The MDD 64GB is very slow and can not handle NTFS Compressed or Not it still has issues. I have split the 64GB even in 2 partitions and then installed windows pro on one of the partitions. The whole installing/formatting took about 32 mins. It runs good like that. I would personal wait until people start talking about the runcore SSDs to see if they can preform as discribe on there website. According to MDD the 64GB sould be running at 70/15 but its really running at 40/10. Save your money for now until people say that is worth buying.

[endGame]

i honestly don't see how small speed benefits can outweigh the possibility of BSOD's and random dirty drive flags being raised out of the blue, lost clusters, lack of journaling, etc.

the MDD branded 64gb is awfully slow...you probably could boot faster with a usb flash drive. although i find running without any antivirus scanner software makes it run much faster. the lack of read/write makes a difference, but again, it's about what you're willing to sacrifice for that bit of improvement. with the runcore ssd you shouldn't really have to care about that anymore.

i received my current 64gb days before the runcore announcement. caved in and bought a 32gb...because i don't feel like throwing down another 200 dollars.

[vincent9993]

I had some issues with my 64GB SSD but I found that my current setup is quite decent. Barely any lag what so ever.

Cold Boot time: 45 seconds

Win XP Pro SP3 nLited
Office 2007 SP1 (Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Access)
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 7.0.0
Windows Defender 1.1.1593.0
Windows Messenger 4.7.2009
Wlss 1.1.0.9
Tweakui (auto logon)

2GB Ram
64GB NTFS partition
Swap file: Disabled
256MB FAT Ramdrive
Temp and TMP env variables point to Ramdrive
IE Temp point to Ramdrive
Indexing service unchecked
NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate Reg hacked
Themes service disabled
Indexing service disabled
No background images
Bluetooth hacked driver

[Palmetto Slim]

I also purchased a 64 GB drive from MDD before the RunCore drives were released. I just finished installing the OS
(XP Home), driver files etc. Used a Win 98 boot CD to fdisk and format as one 64GB FAT 32 drive. Was concerned about speed based on the number of posts about how slow the drives were and followed the advice to set the drive up as FAT 32. 64GB runs fine so far.

[XJ-linux]

I believe Mac OS X will format FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB. If you have access to a Mac and an adaptor, you could format that way.