TR Forums

During installation, you can move the entire Users folder. Useful if you have a small SSD being used as the OS drive, or if you intend to install a lot of large programs. Google for this, there's various posts on the sevenforums about it. Moving the Users folder to the HDD in turn moves AppData, Desktop, Documents, etc. I'd also recommend moving ProgramData to the HDD as well. Apparently, you can also move Program Files / Program Files (x86) but apparently, doing so can get buggy results, so I'd install programs manually to the HDD. (And deal with what's left that stays on the SSD? I guess.)

Small OS drives (i.e. SSD's) + HDD's + Windows 7 = One giant mess. Good luck.

I'd skip the clutter crap on the web like disabling pagefile and hibernation. Half the point of getting an SSD is to speed up paging and hibernation processes. Obviously though, you want TRIM set appropriately, defragmentation and indexing disabled, etc.

just brew it! wrote:

Flying Fox wrote:

Can you even fit the adapter physically inside the laptop chassis?

I think you can get ones that are designed to fit in the large bay that the CD drive goes in. I doubt an adapter would fit in the internal bay.

It does fit to a caddy that goes to the modular bay and it has been recognized. But I am now struggling to install W7 on it.

churin wrote:

It does fit to a caddy that goes to the modular bay and it has been recognized. But I am now struggling to install W7 on it.

Did you remove the internal drive? If not, then maybe that is confusing the installer.

C-A_99 wrote:

During installation, you can move the entire Users folder. Useful if you have a small SSD being used as the OS drive, or if you intend to install a lot of large programs. Google for this, there's various posts on the sevenforums about it. Moving the Users folder to the HDD in turn moves AppData, Desktop, Documents, etc. I'd also recommend moving ProgramData to the HDD as well. Apparently, you can also move Program Files / Program Files (x86) but apparently, doing so can get buggy results, so I'd install programs manually to the HDD. (And deal with what's left that stays on the SSD? I guess.)

If the SSD is too small you have to go that extreme, but I would say moving Downloads, Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos (may be Favorites, but .url files are small) should be enough. The temp folder(s) is where the SSD help with the experience. Think about it, all your browser caches run off the SSD, which should be lightning fast. IMO it defeats the purpose moving all the stuff back to mechanical.

C-A_99 wrote:

Small OS drives (i.e. SSD's) + HDD's + Windows 7 = One giant mess. Good luck.

Organization, management, and decision making. I don't think it is that messy at all. OTOH, we don't need to pinch so much money just to get a 40gig drive anymore, so that makes it less messy.

C-A_99 wrote:

I'd skip the clutter crap on the web like disabling pagefile and hibernation. Half the point of getting an SSD is to speed up paging and hibernation processes. Obviously though, you want TRIM set appropriately, defragmentation and indexing disabled, etc.

Using a modern enough OS should automatically detect the SSD and set those properly. Disabling indexing is debatable, as linked from a previous post.

just brew it! wrote:

churin wrote:

It does fit to a caddy that goes to the modular bay and it has been recognized. But I am now struggling to install W7 on it.

Did you remove the internal drive? If not, then maybe that is confusing the installer.

After all said and done, the SSD drive could not be made as a boot drive.
The following is off-topic but is posted anyway:
My conclusion is that the modular bay can be used as a data drive but not as a boot drive. The problem appear to have nothing to do with SSD. The SSD on the modular bay is recognized so that I can restore a back-up image or clean install W7 on it but the OS just cannot boot from it.
I am using a caddy with a SATA to PATA adapter built-in. A caddy with PATA interface(and PATA hd installed) should work as a boot drive since the modular bay can be set on BIOS as a default boot drive. This seems to indicate that the culprit is the SATA-to-PATA adapter.

That would be... odd. If it can boot from that bay, and the drive is recognized, it should work.

Perhaps it's a PATA master/slave issue. Are there any jumpers or switches on the caddy?

No, the OS cannot boot from that bay being the secondary bay, which is my problem. OS can boot from the drive in the primary bay. I do not see any jumper pin anywhere on the caddy.

But a few posts back, you said:

churin wrote:

A caddy with PATA interface(and PATA hd installed) should work as a boot drive since the modular bay can be set on BIOS as a default boot drive.

so now I'm confused.

just brew it! wrote:

But a few posts back, you said:

churin wrote:

A caddy with PATA interface(and PATA hd installed) should work as a boot drive since the modular bay can be set on BIOS as a default boot drive.

so now I'm confused.

Sorry for the confusion. The Latitude C840 came with 2nd DVD drive in the modular bay. Subsequently I got a caddy with a SATA-To-PATA adapter and replaced the 2nd DVD drive with this caddy in which the SSD is installed.
The above quoted my statement, "A caddy with PATA interface" really means "A caddy without SATA-To-PATA adapter".
I do not have a caddy without such adapter or I never try booting from a PATA hdd in the modular bay.