Install Windows 8 on a laptop with 20GB SSD?

I bought an Acer S3-391-6406 Ultrabook that's still being shipped to my house and I want to know the best way to optimize Windows 8 for it.

Every laptop I own, I like to immediately wipe Windows with a fresh install. I've never owned a laptop with a hybrid hard drive setup before. Will I be able to install Windows 8 64-bit on a 20GB SSD?

I understand that the 20GB SSD purpose is to cache files while using Windows, but I heard people talk about how they installed Windows directly to the small storage SSD.

Also, I heard people talking about how a USB installation will corrupt the SSD while trying to install Windows 8. I only own USB's and my Ultrabook doesn't have a CD drive.

Intel Core i3-2367M (1.40GHz)
4GB Memory
320GB Hard Drive / 20GB SSD
Intel HD Graphics 3000
Windows 8 64-bit

Solution 1:

Barely. Windows 8.1 64-bit needs precisely 20 GB of space to install. You'll need to mount other volumes onto the C: volume in order for this to work well.

For those concerned about the performance and longevity of the SSD, it's important to note that because this is a caching SSD, it is configured to withstand heavy usage. Hence, the reason for the 20 GB (18.63 GiB¹) capacity is aggressive over-provisioning—the drive actually has 32 GiB (34.36 GB) of physical NAND, and this leftover space is used to maintain the performance and longevity of the SSD. For an explanation of why over-provisioning is needed, see the Wikipedia article on write amplification.

¹Storage devices are typically specified with sizes based on decimal units, where 1 KB = 1000 B, 1 MB = 1000 MB, 1 GB = 1000 MB, and so on. However, operating systems report space using binary units, where 1 KiB = 1024 B, 1 MiB = 1024 KiB, 1 GiB = 1024 MiB, and so on. SSDs physically have NAND chips whose capacities are measured in GiB and not GB, but they are nonetheless sold with capacities marked in GB; the otherwise unused space resulting from this difference is typically exploited by SSDs for over-provisioning. For more information, see this Wikipedia article.