HD/SSD Installation Questions

[Aricin]

Hi,

I recently bought this from OC Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache as general use drive and am about to order the OCZ Vertex 2E Bigfoot 120GB 3.5" SATA-II SSD for windows etc.

At the moment I have 2 (320GB Caviar SE16 SATA 300) which I am going to give to my brother.

For reference my main board is Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus Socket 775 with a Q6600 (going to upgrade to new cpu/mobo in about 5-6 months time)


My questions,

I should be able to just physically replace the drives and be able to use the SATA cables already in place? literally do simple swap, correct?

Can i put both drives in at the same time or better to put in the SSD first, install windows once thats all sorted then put in the second drive?

As far as the BIOS goes, will the SSD be automatically recognized? Do I need to make any changes because its an SSD? Will the SSD have to be formated like a mechanical drive?

I am ok if the SSD will be somewhat bottlenecked with my current set up, but i'd still like it to be as fast as possible until i do my CPU/mobo upgrade.

Sorry for the noob questions and thank you for the help

 

[Aricin]

shameless bump

I understand this is complete beginner question, but then again I have not done anything other then exchange ram.

feedback is appreciated

 

[Xelene]

I should be able to just physically replace the drives and be able to use the SATA cables already in place? literally do simple swap, correct?

Correct.

Can i put both drives in at the same time or better to put in the SSD first, install windows once thats all sorted then put in the second drive?

Simpler to just deal with one drive at first

As far as the BIOS goes, will the SSD be automatically recognized? Do I need to make any changes because its an SSD? Will the SSD have to be formated like a mechanical drive?

It's no different from a regular drive really. You should make sure that in the BIOS the SATA mode is set to AHCI

I am ok if the SSD will be somewhat bottlenecked with my current set up, but i'd still like it to be as fast as possible until i do my CPU/mobo upgrade.

Sorry for the noob questions and thank you for the help

If you are using Windows 7 it will sort the SSD out. Otherwise there may be some tweaks to do manually after.

 

[PhillyDee]

As said, better to have just the SSD drive in and install windows. Once everything is hunky-dory, then add the rest of the drive(s).
Otherwise windows might put bits of the OS on other drives. It has happened before.

 

[Aricin]

Thanks guys, help and info is much appreciated