Difference between SSD and HD Win 7 install?

[BobF64]

4k sectors are something different (for 2TB drives & above)
alignment is what's important for SSDs

Not just 2TB and larger, smaller ones too, I have a WD 800GB drive thats 4k sector size, and you either have to set the jumper or run some utility to ensure things are aligned correctly.

Oh, my bad. I thought that Windows 7 was the only OS to support TRIM.

You can also do the same thing manually, I believe, but I dont know if its only on some OSes, or requires certain drivers.

I know that Windows 7, at least initially, requires that you use the Microsoft default drivers for TRIM to work, Intel or other chipset makers might have updated their drivers to work but tbh, I havent checked.

[yamangman]

Win 7 stops defrag and some others services with SSD. I'll dig out the link I read some time ago. Not relevant for installing OS's really, but FYI.

Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn’t helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces. The FAQ section below has some additional details.

Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

Since SSDs tend to perform at their best when the operating system’s partitions are created with the SSD’s alignment needs in mind, all of the partition-creating tools in Windows 7 place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment.

[GaryRW]

sorry to jump in on all this, but if I had cloned my old OS image onto an SSD, is there any way I could tell whether it was aligned or not??

trim is active according to the disabledeletenotify query, but I put the SSD in a few months ago now and can't remember whether I formatted and partitioned it before cloning the OS image to it.