Question Dual Booting from an SSD

[IttyBitty359]

Hello All,

As the title says.

I currently have a system that dual boots Ubuntu and Windows 10 from a WD 500gb spinning hard drive and want to upgrade it to an ssd.

I understand that you have to keep a certain amount of space free on an ssd for housekeeping (garbage collection?) for single boot systems.

But what about a dual boot system?

Would going to 1tb be sufficient?

Thanks.

 

[Darkbreeze]

500GB is more than sufficient, but it really depends on how much you generally have installed or stored on your primary drive. Windows itself only takes up about 20-25GB after installation, but other programs you install, or games (If you are installing the bulk of the game files on that drive as well rather than on a secondary drive, which is preferable, so that if something happens to your Windows installation such as it becoming corrupted, or infected, or simply otherwise borked up, you don't lose your game files in the process. Obviously it should go without saying that anything of importance should ALWAYS be backed up to a second or even third location anyhow so there is no chance of permanently losing anything that would cause you to tear your clothes off in grief and run screaming down the street while pulling your hair out.), might take up significantly more.

So it really depends on how much you plan on actually putting on that drive aside from Windows and Ubuntu. If you don't install all that much on the OS drive, then 500GB is probably fine. I have a Windows 11 installation with TONS of applications, mods, utilities and game loaders all on the same drive and I still have plenty of room on my 500GB 970 EVO Plus M.2 SSD, but a 1TB SSD should be plenty regardless of what you are doing so long as you have or plan to get other drives for extremely large game file storage, or things like you music, movie or picture collections.