Computer Guru SSD drive question

[79XS11F]

I picked up a solid state drive for my computer that will become the operating systems new home. I have my recovery disc's that were made as soon as this computer was originally booted up. Can I just power down, unplug the current drive, plug in the new solid state drive, boot up and use my recovery disc's to reinstall everything that came with the computer?
Rob

[xswilly]

should be able to
but you may have to run the cd that came with the hard drive
depends on what operating system you are installing

[79XS11F]

Installing on WIN 7. The solid state drive does not come with a disc. Seller says that the computer will recognize the drive as soon as I boot the machine up.
Rob

[TopCatGr58]

Hey Rob,

SOunds like you have a fairly new machine, and their Mobos BIOS are designed to recognize the newer styled HD's, ie., SATA, etc, and not just E-IDE. With WinXP, folks often needed to get the device drivers for their SATA drives if their MOBO's didn't handle the I/O functions natively, and then install the HD drivers during the setup process before they could access the HD to install the OS!

I would think that the new SSD HD has a similar interface as the SATA HD that you have in there now, so it should be plug and play and install. Not much to worry about, you will have removed the old HD, so it's OS will still be intact, so if the new SSD isn't recognized, you can just put the old drive back in and you'll have your system back!

You'll probably be required to re-activate Win 7, hopefully they will realize that the entire computer hasn't changed, just the hard drive, and it should re-activate just fine. Good Luck.

T.C.

[79XS11F]

Hey Rob,

SOunds like you have a fairly new machine, and their Mobos BIOS are designed to recognize the newer styled HD's, ie., SATA, etc, and not just E-IDE. With WinXP, folks often needed to get the device drivers for their SATA drives if their MOBO's didn't handle the I/O functions natively, and then install the HD drivers during the setup process before they could access the HD to install the OS!

I would think that the new SSD HD has a similar interface as the SATA HD that you have in there now, so it should be plug and play and install. Not much to worry about, you will have removed the old HD, so it's OS will still be intact, so if the new SSD isn't recognized, you can just put the old drive back in and you'll have your system back!

You'll probably be required to re-activate Win 7, hopefully they will realize that the entire computer hasn't changed, just the hard drive, and it should re-activate just fine. Good Luck.

T.C.

Ya, this machines original HD is SATA II and the new SSD is SATA II I was concerned that the recovery discs "may" see that the SSD drive IS NOT the original drive and abort the recovery.
Rob

[cywelchjr]

No, it should be fine, and Win7 is compatible with SSD's and actually changes it's I/O modes to work properly with them which earlier versions of Windows did not without special drivers and modifications. If nothing but the drive has changed, it may not even need anything special to re-activate, as it should see it as the same computer, as it should be under the threshold for being required to explain why so much has changed.

[79XS11F]

OK, I have all my stuff backed up so I guess I will give it a go.
Rob

[79XS11F]

Well that proved to be too easy. Recovery disc's partitioned the disc, installed all the factory software and the computer is now the FASTEST computer I have ever seen. I installed all 106 WIN updates, and my programs but have not installed my anti virus software yet and it boots up to ready to open programs in just over 8 seconds. Programs open instantly. This was a worth while upgrade.
Rob

[79XS11F]

Part 2 Question

I now have everything I want on this new disc and still have the original disc in the machine but not connected. It still has the operating system installed on it. I want to format it and use it as a back up disc or perhaps just additional storage. So how do I connect it for formatting without the operating system that is still on it trying to run?
Rob

[natemoen]

You will need to go into your BIOS and make sure the settings are set so that it boots from the new drive and the old one is a secondary.

The old drive may also have a set of pins on the back that may need to be set as a slave so it won't boot from it.

[Jerry]

I put a 120gb SSD drive in my Win 7 Pro box a few months back. It does work find. However, SSD drives do require some specialized attention due to the way data is written and removed from them. Mechanical drives are rated MTBF, mean Time Between failure. SSD drives are rated for the number of read / writes they will perform before the memory starts to lose integrity. If you use a disk defragmentation program, make sure it is designed for SSD disks, such as Intel's SSD ToolBox software. You may also want to turn off Indexing and SuperFetch if you are running Win 7.

Using the right tools will extend the useful life of an SSD drive.

[3Phase]

Rob, like Nate said you have to go to the CMOS setup screen and make sure the SSD is the boot device.

SSD drives are getting better but even with the improved wear-leveling algorithms they're still not as durable as regular drives.

You should go into the system settings and make sure the swap file, TEMP and TMP variables are set to use a partition on the SATA drive and not the SSD.

[natemoen]

Rob, like Nate said you have to go to the CMOS setup screen and make sure the SSD is the boot device.

SSD drives are getting better but even with the improved wear-leveling algorithms they're still not as durable as regular drives.

You should go into the system settings and make sure the swap file, TEMP and TMP variables are set to use a partition on the SATA drive and not the SSD.

Could always uses the SSD as more of a static/read only only (i.e. for the OS, main programs and what not) and then used the other hhd as the place you store all the other stuff that frequently gets moved around added and deleted.

I have thought about doing this many times before just haven't cared enough to do it yet.

[3Phase]

Back up your data

A couple of drawbacks with any SSD is that the write speed is a lot slower than a regular drive and each memory 'cell' can only be erased/written a finite number of times before it fails. The SSD data reads and transfers are lightning-quick but data writes can bring the system to its knees.

Relocating the system swap file and pointing the temp variables to a separate physical drive or a RAM disk will help prolong the life of a SSD and it will speed things up even with fast conventional drives but it makes the system more complicated to set up or restore from backup. On the bright side you don't have to defrag the drive or at least it cuts down the time required to do it when the filesystem isn't bombarded with billions of disk writes and temporary files every week.

If Hibernation is enabled then the hyberfil.sys file has to go in the root of the system partition along with at least a small page file for Windows to use for memory dumps. Windows itself likes to do a lot of reading and writing to the System, User and Security hives that make up the Registry and it is not a good idea to change their location even if you think you know what you are doing.

Application programs don't always respect and use the system settings for their own work space and, depending on the application, they can create and destroy anywhere from a couple of files per month to a couple of million files per minute.

Then there is the reliability of the SSDs themselves. A cheap drive that uses cheap memory is obviously not going to last very long before it hoses up and spews but even the big-name suppliers have still problems: Intel® SSD 320 Series: Firmware update now available - Addresses Bad Context 13x Error

Back up your data.

[cywelchjr]

Another point though is that Windows 7 is the first version to recognize SSD drives and change it's operating behavior to be more friendly to them. My understanding is it cuts out a lot of it's talking to the drive at least as far as writes, understanding that it's a bad thing. I've not tried it myself yet, but I know it's something that was designed it to make it easy to build windows 7 based laptops using SSD's only for storage and be able to have good drive life without having to have a special version or special drivers like XP did (and Vista was specifically NOT recommended for that use).

PS, I'm thinking about switching to and SSD drive in my Dell laptop at some time in the not too distant future.