About to install my first SSD - advice needed please

Havana_UK

Havana_UK

Havana_UK

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Like many of you I recently took advantage of OCUKs amazing deal on the 120GB OCZ Vertex 2E, so I'm looking forward to getting it installed.

For a long time I have stuck with traditional HDDs purely on a cost/storage capacity basis, but with HDD prices having gone up and the SSD deal that OCUK did I figured now would be a great time to jump in.

I've never installed an SSD before, so I'm looking for some tips and advice. My current PC has a 1TB HDD in, which has about 300-odd GB used (OS, games, apps, media (180ish GB of it) etc). Ideally I would like to avoid a fresh Win7 install, but clearly the new SSD won't take a straight image of my current HDD. Is there any way I can create a selective image, i.e. not the whole disk?

I've also read that there are other issues when you install an SSD as a primary drive on an old install, the main one of which seems to be that you need to do a registry mod to enable AHCI. Are there any other things to look out for?

I've seen that you should not use defrag on SSDs as this eats into the number of write cycles the drive has completed. Is this right?

Finally, I've read that you shouldn't do a complete format on an SSD, and use the quick format function only. Is this right, and if so, what's the reason for this?

Thanks in advance for any help.
 
In your case I would recommend a fresh install. You are resizing down and also going from an IDE to an AHCI controller in bios.

You may find that any image will not be correctly aligned, this requires changing the system partition size if it is not exactly 100Mb when cloned and can be a problem.

Change to AHCI in bios before the new install. Your media will not be a problem to access from the new install, apps and games on the old drive may need a reinstall but may just need pointing to for them to run correctly.

You can write the full drive (full format) but you should not need to.
 
I have also taken advantage of the greeat prices on the 120GB vertex, and was wondering if there are any arguments against cloning my drive, given that my boot partition is under 100GB, and I'm pretty sure I'm already in AHCI.
Obviously I would need to disable defrag, enable TRIM and so on, but was wondering if there are any other pitfalls.
I am fully aware that a reinstall would be my best bet, but really don't have the time or patience to re-setup every little program to my liking!

Thanks in advance
 
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