Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, Steel
TDIdriver wrote:What exactly do you need a transfer kit for? Cloning an hdd onto an ssd isn't ideal.
ludi wrote:Well, that sounds workable enough. I'll have to dig that 320 box out of storage and verify that I really do have the cable in there.
ludi wrote:TDIdriver wrote:What exactly do you need a transfer kit for? Cloning an hdd onto an ssd isn't ideal.
This laptop came with no restore media and the option to burn ONE set of backup media. I have no idea if those burned discs would even work after a couple years in storage. Also, I have a copy of Office 2007 H&S, which includes 5 activations for use in one household. Four of those are taken, two gone forever as a result of a clean OS reinstalls. If I do a clean reinstall on the laptop then I use the last one, which I want to keep in reserve for a little longer as an emergency spare.
The current install, which sees only light use and very little new program installs or modification, is working great. So I just want to replicate it. That may mean I forfeit 100MB/s of peak throughput due to un-optimally aligned file table boundaries or whatever, but these days, that's not the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.
ludi wrote:This laptop came with no restore media and the option to burn ONE set of backup media. I have no idea if those burned discs would even work after a couple years in storage. Also, I have a copy of Office 2007 H&S, which includes 5 activations for use in one household. Four of those are taken, two gone forever as a result of a clean OS reinstalls. If I do a clean reinstall on the laptop then I use the last one, which I want to keep in reserve for a little longer as an emergency spare.
Airmantharp wrote:Yeah, the 830 in my desktop sleeps every night with no issues, and the 320 (the system drive when I boot Win8) hasn't had any problems either. This may be Yet Another SandForce Anomaly.I can say that the M4 works fine in all regards, as I'm using one in my Clevo right now, and Intel's 320's are also rock solid.
ludi wrote:I dug the Intel 320 retail box out of storage and found the easy-USB dongle and protective silicone slipcover still inside. Nice. Now I just need to lie in wait until the next time a 256GB M4 or 830 drops below $200 on a weekend sale.
Leaving some unpartitioned space for failure reallocation sounds like a good idea. A 128GB SSD wouldn't quite get me there because I need freespace for uploading and editing images from my camera while on the road, but a 256GB capacity should be fine. The current mechanical drive is 320GB and is nowhere near full.
External drives are annoying, but they're perfect for uploading images for quick access. Just move the ones you need to edit onto the SSD if the mechanical interface is too slow for that, though it shouldn't be.
ludi wrote:The Samsung 830 arrived in the second half of the week. I ended up doing an initial partition and format under Windows7 and then using Clonezilla, booting from a USB drive, to image the existing HDD to the new SSD over USB. The existing drive actually has three partitions (Recovery - 12GB, System - 100MB, and Windows - everything else) so I scaled back the size of the Windows partition so that all three partitions would fit neatly within the new SSD while leaving about 9GB unallocated.
Clonezilla was a little obscure to use, but once I found my way through it the job got done, and all three partitions mirrored correctly. I verified that the BIOS was running in AHCI mode and then disabled the defragmenter as well. System is not as snappy as my i5 desktop, but (1) duh and (2) it is noticeably quicker and that's what I wanted to see.
The only oddity is that Samsung's SSD Magician software reports exactly 250MB/s for sequential read and write when the benchmark utility is run with default settings. That smells like a motherboard controller limit although I'm not entirely sure how to interpret it. FWIW, random read and write are around 30k IOPS read and 15k IOPS write.
yogibbear wrote:Noob question, is it plugged into a SataII port and not a SataIII?
ludi wrote:The Samsung 830 arrived in the second half of the week. I ended up doing an initial partition and format under Windows7 and then using Clonezilla, booting from a USB drive, to image the existing HDD to the new SSD over USB. The existing drive actually has three partitions (Recovery - 12GB, System - 100MB, and Windows - everything else) so I scaled back the size of the Windows partition so that all three partitions would fit neatly within the new SSD while leaving about 9GB unallocated.
Ryu Connor wrote:This can be verified one way or the other using DISKPART from an Administrative command prompt: once in DISKPART use LIST DISK to find the SSD (if you have several disks you'll have to go by the raw capacities to identify the SSD, or run DISKMGMT.MSC to give you a translation of volume name to disk number). With the disk number (n) at the DISKPART prompt:If Clonezilla does sector based imaging instead of file based imagaing, then your partitions may not be aligned.
DISKPART> select disk 0
Disk 0 is now the selected disk.
DISKPART> list partition
Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Primary 107 GB 1024 KB
Bytes Per Sector : 512
Bytes Per Physical Sector : 512
Bytes Per Cluster : 4096
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment : 1024 <---
Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- -------------- ------- --------
Partition 1 Recovery 12 GB 1024 KB
Partition 2 Primary 100 MB 12 GB
Partition 3 Primary 217 GB 12 GB