Any tips for an SSD hard drive

[NightOwl]

I've been eyeing up these SSD drives too, they certainly look the business when it comes to boot and application startup speeds but I agree it's possibly early days yet to jump in, given the high prices and relatively low capacities at the moment.

The OP mentioned Windows 7 - I am using Win 7 too and have noticed that the installation of this OS includes a second, small partition on the system drive called "System Reserved". This partition is only 102MB in size, has no drive letter assigned to it and I'm not quite sure what it does, exactly, but presumably it would be wise to include this "hidden" partition as well as the primary boot/system partition on a new SSD drive?

Just a thought anyway, and one that I hope is worth mentioning for anyone considering cloning an existing system drive or partition - it's only because of recent HDD problems that I have been nosing around my disk and partition structures that I happened to notice this.

[jt256]

Can I just clarify a couple of things while this thread is active. I've had a dig around in the case, it's gonna be easy to plug the sata connector into the drive. As for power (thanks to gheestar for pic) there's loads of sata power connectors kicking around the case, thanks to 3XS for some thoughtful and tidy wiring. The handiest one is the one already attached to the CD drive, I guess they're wired in parallel because there are loads of stat power connectors 'clamped' onto the wires themselves.

So dyou think it'd be fine to power an ssd drive with the wires already attached to the CD drive? This ought to do the job as far as I can see.

The next question would be how to a) take my windows 7 backup image and stick it on the new drive, and b) how to teach the bios to treat the new ssd drive as the default system drive.

Apologies if these are trivial, but they may help other future upgraders in addition to myself.
Thanks!

[NightOwl]

I think any available power connector will do - if it physically fits the drive and has power to it then there's no chance of you making a mistake or anything, if that's what you're worried about. In my case I have one cable with three power connectors on it, enough for three disk drives in the lower part of my PC case. There's probably another one or two spare connectors around the DVD drive area at the top too.

As for the system transfer, do you have True Image? I got this software with my 3XS PC earlier this year and used it just a few days ago to "clone" my system drive, lock, stock and barrel, from one hard disk drive to another (this involved copying 3 partitions: C: Windows, the hidden "System Reserved" and a third partition that I had created). So I am in the fortunate position of having the procedure all fresh in my memory.

This is what I would do:
1) Use True Image to clone the C: (Windows) to SSD drive.
Note: my Windows (boot) partition at present is 80GB in size and contains about 28GB of data - that amount of data could be put onto a 64GB SSD with room to spare, for sure. True Image would make the necessary changes to shrink the original 80GB partition to fit the smaller 64GB SSD.
2) Reboot > go into BIOS > find the section on boot devices and hard drive boot order - set system to boot first from new SSD drive. It's very easy, just remember to press F10 to save changes (or whatever else is needed to save) and the job's done!
3) In time I would probably re-format the original system drive, remove all the Windows stuff and start using it as a normal, non-bootable data drive.

If you don't have True Image then I'm sure there are other programs you could use to do a similar job, perhaps even free ones. Or you could take the opportunity to start afresh with your SSD drive and install Windows and applications from scratch - not a task to relish, particularly, but a fresh start every now and again does remove a lot of the unnecessary clutter that accumulates over time.

Oh, and about the Windows 7 "System Reserved" partition I mentioned earlier - I just had a very quick read up on it and I don't think it's strictly necessary after all. It seems that Windows creates this unnamed partition when you install onto a drive that has no partitions to start with. It's some sort of Recovery drive and/or something to do with BitLocker (which I don't have anyway), but if you have a Windows CD then I don't see it would ever be needed.... so I would be tempted to try a clone of just my C: Windows partition and forget about re-creating "System Reserved". A bit more research is in order, though... just to be sure.

[jt256]

Thanks NightOwl, I do have Acronis, but as far as I can see it's image backup is rendered obsolete by windows 7 new backup functions, which allow me to store my c drive as a vhd file on an external hard drive (as long as it's NTFS). As for moving it back, I can either do that from windows itself, or from a recovery CD. Though I haven't tried yet.

I've recently installed clean win7 pro, and got my apps and settings just how I like them, so I'm hoping to use this image as the clean slate to return to whenever things start to get a bit slow. All my docs are on a separate partition, my c drive is currently 33gb.

Thanks for your tips though hopefully I won't have to worry about the system partitions. Only thing is I'm not sure if I'll have to fiddle with bios settings to use USB drive as source of backup image.

[NightOwl]

I've not investigated Win 7 backups as I have my own backup program and True Image... but if these vhd files are full images of complete partitions (along with hidden system files, Master Boot Record etc.) then I expect it would work in much the same way.

I imagine transferring from a USB drive shouldn't be a problem if you do it from within Windows itself, where the USB device will be available as soon as you plug it in and Windows can see both the USB device and the new SSD. Unless the procedure requires a re-boot to accomplish the transfer outside the Win environment, of course. That I don't know - it may only be necessary in situations where you are over-writing the existing Windows partition, which won't be the case in this instance.

In any event, if any of this doesn't work as expected you will always have your old drive and system to fall back on so there's no real harm in trying. Providing you are careful at every stage (e.g. not to write to the wrong drive in error, for instance) this sort of procedure is really not half as difficult or complicated as it sounds.

[jt256]

Well, it turns out win 7 is no match for acronis. I couldn't figure out how to restore my backup to a different drive. Perhaps by disconnecting the old c drive and tricking the system into installing the restore image onto the new c drive it might work, but I have to say acronis's boot cd did the job marvellously.

I didn't quite understand how windows decides which drive is going to be the C drive, so I just swapped the SATA leads around, and played with the bios bootup order, and hopefully so far so good.

So don't rely on making a win 7 image to clone to a new drive, you're better off using acronis from boot Cd I reckon.

[NightOwl]

Good to hear you found an alternative to the Win 7 imaging offering, which sounds disappointing. Perhaps it just hasn't matured into a really useable product yet. *shrug*

So... have you actually taken the plunge and bought/installed an SSD now? Or is this all just part of your preliminary investigations into how to perform a possible future upgrade? If the former I'm curious to hear your impressions and experience of the new drive.