Hello everyone,

During the next month or so, I am going to purchase an SSD drive. I am building the new rig this weekend (was unable to $$ and unknowledgable of how beneficial the SSD can be), and wanted to know how much of a PITA it will be to move Win 7 from a HD to an SSD drive.

Because I will have had Win 7 installed on a HD only for a few weeks prior to purchase of the SSD, the amount of programs, etc. will be relatively minimal. I have a 500gb external HD that relatively old, but where I plan on putting all my music, movies, etc. so if I needed to wipe the HD to install a SSD as my main, that would be ok.

Thoughts or comments are appreciated!

Super easy.

Connect the SSD drive to the computer as a secondary drive.
Boot from your regular HDD.
Run Macrium Reflect Free. Clone the C: drive to the SSD drive.
Shut down and restart into the BIOS and make the SSD the primary boot device (or remove the HDD, however you want to do it).
Finished.

Basically all you have to do is clone the HDD to SSD drive and boot from the SSD.

Thank you. I passed right over the SSD drives during the build Q&A due to cost vs. storage capacity. I figured it had more time to go before it was usable...I just couldn't see spending over $100 for a 64gb storage unit.

Now that I have had time to read many of the reviews concerning SSD drives, it seems pretty amazing, comparitively speaking.

I assume Win 7 is around 20gb, and with SWTOR being around the same, that only leaves another 20gb+ on a 64gb drive.

Or...do you put Win 7 and movies on the SSD and everything else on a standard HD?

What seems to give you the best performance?

Would be no reason to really put movies on SSD unless you are doing some major editing and stuff. There is a benefit to putting a game on SSD as far as load times.

 

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I would put Windows, apps, and SWTOR on the SSD drive.
Everything else, movies, music, etc, on the hard drive.

Disable Windows Hibernation, that eats a lot of space.
If you use a page file, you might want to manually reduce it's size and make it static. Other people disable it all together, I'm still on the fence on if that's a good idea or not.

Tekzilla just did a nice show on that today, here is a link to the segment.

http://revision3.com/tekzilla/pc-troubleshooting#rev3Player

 

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So if I got an Intel 510 Series 120G SSD, you are saying that I should put Windows 7, WoW, Skyrim...ALL of these on the SSD? Doesn't WoW read and write a lot and therefore decrease the lifetime of the SSD? What I was thinking if I got an SSD would be to put just Windows 7 on the SSD at first, then see as time goes on what other programs/apps would be ideal to migrate over to the SSD. Oh, and all this as a fresh format and install onto the SSD -- it's been several months since I installed everything onto these computers so a fresh install would probably be very helpful vs. a mirror transfer.

 

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Reads are free, writes shorten life. That said, even playing games for 12 hours a day on average might cause you a problem on these drives after about 4-5 years, think of the side drive you were using that long ago and reason if you really think this drive will be worth keeping that long.


Over and above this, put the Windows swap file on a different drive, that is written to quite a lot more than anything else the PC will do.

 

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You might want data beyond a few years, but I don't mind wiping the OS every 4-5 years. I remember when people used to recommend every 6 months, haha.

 

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I don't remember the last time I retained an OS for 4-5 years...wow. I probably still reinstall mine every 6mo-1yr (often trying out something new). I've never had an OS feel the same after a year as it did the day I installed it.

 

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