TR Forums

Hey all, I just bought a new OCZ Vertex 3, this will be my 3rd hard drive, but my first SSD.

Anyways, I've never had an SSD before and don't know a whole lot about them, I'm runing Windows 7 64. After installing the drive, I set it to MBR instead of GPT, and I formatted it as NTFS. I assume leaving the whole thing as one partition will be fine?

My main question is was MBR and NTFS the right choices, and is therre anything else I should know before I format my OS partition on my other drive and slap windows on this drive?

Thank you,
MJB

Just installed my first SSD (Intel 330 180GB) less than a week ago. To answer your question, it doesn't really matter if you use MBR or GPT. GPT is only necessary for large hard drives (~2tb) I believe, but either one will work fine. I STRONGLY recommend you do a clean install of windows on the SSD, and let the installer do the formatting. Also be sure to set the SATA operation mode as "AHCI" in the BIOS, or you will likely run into problems. Update your chipset and storage drivers as well. Other than that I think you should be fine. Try installing Win from a USB key for added solid-state l33tness. Check your transfer speeds after youre done against online data to make sure it's all good. If you aren't getting what you expect, there might be some issue you need to resolve.

I love mine so far, windoze loads fast, ME3 loads levels damn near instantly, no more texture pop-in either.

Once you've booted to windows, run Windows Experience Index by right clicking "Computer" => Properties. This allows Windows to identify that you have a SSD installed and it will automatically make some adjustments like disabling scheduled defragmentations and such. One other peace of mind item is to disable hibernation in the Power Options. SSD's don't seem to cope well with waking from hibernation so save yourself the potential for headaches. My computer takes about 10 seconds to boot after post with all the background startup processes completed so a cold boot is probably almost as fast as waking from hibernate anyway.

DPete27 wrote:

SSD's don't seem to cope well with waking from hibernation so save yourself the potential for headaches.

Wait, what? Do you have a reference for this? Hibernation IS a shutdown and cold boot, except that the system copies the entire memory contents to or from hiberfil.sys so that the machine can resume its previous operating state. There usually isn't much need for it on a desktop, which can simply be put to sleep and draw standby power from the wall, but it's rather invaluable on a laptop.

DPete27 wrote:

SSD's don't seem to cope well with waking from hibernation so save yourself the potential for headaches.

1 good reason to not hibernate with your OS on the SSD is space. AFAIK you cannot put the required hiberfil.sys (several GBs) on anything other than the drive on which Windows is installed.

ludi wrote:

Do you have a reference for this?

Meh, for what it's worth, here's an article that explains SSD optimization. It discusses hibernate, but my comment was a recollection of various SSD firmware issues that I've read about over the past year or so. Maybe my memory decieves me, but I use my SSD on my desktop so hibernation is not necessary for my use (as ludi noted)

Wasn't power issues associated with "waking" from hibernate the root of the "Sandforce BSOD Bug" that was fixed last October? Fixed or not, hibernate is not necessary for my use, so I disabled it just to be safe.

Hibernation can be useful if you want to power down but keep all open windows in place...just a thought. Doesn't 'sleep' leave the RAM powered or something?

That's a good optimisation guide by the way, thanks! I'll go through that a bit later. I had hoped that Windows would have disabled most of that stuff by default..never mind!

Good stuff, I'm actually a litttle busy this week so probably won't get around to it til much later. One thing I just thought of is that I have a boot partition on my old drive, so when I start up I have the option to boot to windows/linux or run memtest.

When I reinstall win to the SSD I will have to make a boot part on that drive wont I? may as well throw linux on that one too, drives 120, don't use linux much so 10-20gb part should be fine I think.