Will Partitioning My SSD For Dual Boot Cause A Performance Drop? Tips?

Question

I have a nice laptop (i5, 8gb, 256gbssd) and I want to dual boot Windows 10 and Ubuntu. Some people and some forms explained that you shouldn't partition an SSD, or the performance will decrease. Other forms had stories of people doing this and seemed fine.

Could someone clarify whether it's safe to partition an SSD for dual booting purposes? If it does affect performance, how bad is it? What do I need to do to keep my PC at peak performance? How much unallocated space should I leave free? Any other tips?

Normally, when I do this type of thing, I use a desktop with two separate ssd's. One for each operating system, then put my home folder and files on a different HDD, then another one for RAID1..... If I need to, I can buy a low profile flash drive, and boot Ubuntu off a live disk each time, but I'd prefer a dual boot.

Thanks!

Solution

I was puzzled by the same question before dual-booting my laptop with Ubuntu. Now that I'm done with partitioning my Samsung 850 EVO drive, I can say from experience that partitioning has no visible effect on SSD performance. My system is as snappy as always. Both Windows and Ubuntu work flawlessly. I have 100GB system partition, 300GB for games/programs, 40GB for Ubuntu and the rest for OP. There are 2 smaller partitions, 450MB recovery & 100MB EFI.

While day to day tasks don't feel slow, I should point out that benchmark results from Samsung Magician show reduced random IOPS. Sequential read/write are 544/520 MBPS which is fine. But Random read/write which used to be around 88k IOPS now shows ~44k IOPS. I don't know what's causing this. Maybe it's assessing only C drive?

As for unallocated space, depending on manufacturer, SSDs may need anywhere between 5%-12% of total capacity. For performance/reliability, you may want to have a look at this guide -

http://www.thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/optimization-guides/the-ssd-optimization-guide-ultimate-windows-8-edition/

Comments

[Admin]

If you have Windows installed you have a lot of partitions already. I think the comments may have been not to fully partition a SSD. Some suggest leaving 5% or so unallocated so SSD can better manage itself. But I thought the unused space inside a partition served same purpose. Some good tips here: sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/ssd

[Admin]

Creating partitions on SSD does not affect performance. Your question is not clear.

[Admin]

Thanks for the replies. After doing all of my research, I'm starting to find that there is a 'happy medium' of taking care of you're ssd. @oldfred, thanks for the article. It gave me pleanty of information to work with! Thanks again!

[Zeiss Ikon]

This agrees with my experience as well. Neither on SSD nor on platter drives is there a noticeable change in performance from dual-booting with separate partitions.