Buying 1st SSD, questions.

[Skullzer]

Hey guys!

So newegg has the crucial m4 256gb for $209. I'm going to buy but I have a few questions. I currently have my OS (w7 home), programs, media, and files on my 1tb spinpoint..would you suggest I try to clone that drive to the new SSD or do a fresh install? I do have a copy of w7 pro thy I was planning on upgrading to and I have a 2tb had I use for backup and a system image. My concerns are that I currently have about 500gb used on my main drive now so I don't even know if doing a clone is even possible. I plan on using the new ssd for os, programs, and games. I'll use the 1tb for media and general file, the 2tb drive for backups.

Sorry if this doesn't make sense, I'm on my cell phone writing this while at work lol. The rest of my system specs are in my signature.

[garikfox]

Cool !, youll love your SSD, Once you go SSD youll never go back to a spinner drive.

Yes do a fresh install of Win7 on the SSD

Just a FYI Make sure your BIOS is set to AHCI for the SATA ports

[ludi]

Cloning is possible provided the source files to be copied are less than the available capacity on the new drive, but it usually makes more sense to do a clean installation. Also, Windows7 will automatically disable defrag and enable some performance features when installed to an SSD. When copied from a previous mechanical installation, you may have to do some manual cleanup work afterward in order to get best reliability and performance.

[Skullzer]

Alrighty, I guess sittin in front of my computer for a few hours installing apps and drivers won't be so bad. Thanks for the responses.

[credible]

Alrighty, I guess sittin in front of my computer for a few hours installing apps and drivers won't be so bad. Thanks for the responses.

Agreed on the other posts, depending on your backup utility, you should be able to save your main files, but OS and everything else do a fresh install.

Yes, you will be very happy:)

[td1353l]

you dont have to reinstall anything other than java, directx and drivers. you can go to other windows installs, find your programs there, right click and run as admin, and the vast majority of them will work, including games. all of steam and 10 games are still on my ORIGINAL XP installed hard drive and am playing them flawlessly on win7 with my SSD.. but like i said, directx n such will need to be reinstalled tho. good luck, yeah, you wont ever want to go back to mechanical if you had the choice, its amazing what i though was fast b4 was.

i say that to say, you will find you wont have to reinstall all your programs when you purchase another boot drive. everything is still very much installed, just on another drive.

[Skullzer]

you dont have to reinstall anything other than java, directx and drivers. you can go to other windows installs, find your programs there, right click and run as admin, and the vast majority of them will work, including games. all of steam and 10 games are still on my ORIGINAL XP installed hard drive and am playing them flawlessly on win7 with my SSD.. but like i said, directx n such will need to be reinstalled tho. good luck, yeah, you wont ever want to go back to mechanical if you had the choice, its amazing what i though was fast b4 was.

i say that to say, you will find you wont have to reinstall all your programs when you purchase another boot drive. everything is still very much installed, just on another drive.

When I installed the new drive I set it as ahci in bios...apparently my old drive was running in IDE mode. When my OS launches in the new drive I can see the old drive but if I right click and run as admin it doesn't work to run application. Also if I try to boot from my old drive it won't let me, I have to go back in bios, switch back to IDE then it works fine.

On a side note, man the ssd is sooo nice and quiet! The only sound my computer makes now is the Gpu fan when I'm gaming!

I'm sure I can find the answer in the forums, but what do you guys recommend I use to benchmark my new drive? Also, I noticed in my bios that it's set to "auto" as far as choosing sata 2 or sata 3 for my connections. Is there anyway to tell through windows that the drive is in fact running at 6gb sata 3?

[hp9000]

Just in case you don't want to keep fiddling with your bios settings for ide/ahci, I suggest you boot one more time into XP (in IDE mode, of course) and install the AHCI drivers. Then change the bios setting back to AHCI. Here's a how-to but I'm sure there are many more if you google it.

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831

As far as benchmarking your ssd, here's a tool that's used widely:

http://www.downloadcrew.com/article/192 ... _benchmark

Enjoy your new ssd and come back to report your findings!

[Skullzer]

Just in case you don't want to keep fiddling with your bios settings for ide/ahci, I suggest you boot one more time into XP (in IDE mode, of course) and install the AHCI drivers. Then change the bios setting back to AHCI. Here's a how-to but I'm sure there are many more if you google it.

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831

As far as benchmarking your ssd, here's a tool that's used widely:

http://www.downloadcrew.com/article/192 ... _benchmark

Enjoy your new ssd and come back to report your findings!

Thanks for the links! I did find another way to change from IDE to AHCI in W7 from this link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976 As soon as I ran the fix all I had to do was reboot one time and it now let's me boot my old drive in AHCI mode...but for some reason in my bios I can only choose my new SSD or my old HDD as the boot drive, for some reason it won't let me set the boot priority so I can boot from either. I mean it won't let me select a second bootable drive. So I still need to go in to bios if I want to boot off the HDD. No biggie though, I'm going to move some files off and just wipe the disk completely and use it as my music/movies/etc drive.

as far as the benchmark is concerned, my new SSD scored a 637 using that benchmark you linked. I looked at this chart: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/ssd-charts-2011/AS-SSD-4K-Q64-Random-Write,Marque_fbrandx5064,2787.html and I noticed it scored a little lower than the M4 they tested. I'll look to see if there's some settings I need to adjust to get a better score.