Installing an OS onto an SSD for boot!! Help!

BennettWHU

BennettWHU

BennettWHU

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17 May 2012
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I'm in the process of buying my first SSD and I've decided to go for a 120GB Kingston HyperX 3k. The reason for this purchase is to allow my system to boot from an SSD and use my normal HDD while running. I know my way around a PC quite well and I can do or understand most things, but I need help with installing an OS onto my SSD without messing up my HDD. The only use for this SSD is for an OS, but I may put some games onto it in the future or applications like STEAM or Origin. Again, for now, it is just so my PC can boot from the SSD so it almost boots instantly and then my normal files like, documents, music, videos, pictures etc will be on my HDD. These are the specifications of the SSD I'm going to buy;



  • Sequential reads SATA-III - 555MB/s
  • Sequential writes SATA-III - 510MB/s
  • Sustained random 4K R/W - 120GB – 20,000/60,000 IOPS
  • Max. random 4K R/W - 120GB – 85,000/73,000 IOPS
  • PCMARK Vantage HDD Suite Score 60,000
  • Supports SMART, TRIM, and Garbage Collection
 
Without knowing much more, I'd say first disconnect your existing HDD *before* installing your o/s onto your SSD.

Once installed, go to your libraries, my documents, my pictures, and redirect to your (now attached) HDD.

Shouldn't be more complicated than that. I do the same for my machine, where I want to keep my o/s drive as relaxed as possible.
 
as above but set to ahci first in the bios and connect the sd to intal sata3 ports

install windows and re attach your hdd,set the ssd as first boot device in the bios

when you install steam choose custom in the install process and point it to the storage hdd and it will install there,same goes for any other progrmas/games
 
Yes like Wazza said, make sure you set AHCI in bios first then install windows (this enables stuff like the TRIM support).

Disconnecting the old drive will prevent anything getting written/destroyed.

Steam pretty much offers up the option to install to different drives now as a matter of course, just make a new library folder on the storage drive and install, as easy as saying Big Sam ;)
 
Once you select SSD as your new boot drive and get into Windows (or whatever other OS you're using) you will have to manually remove OS (in fact formatting may be needed - I had to do it recently when switching to SSD as my OS drive). You may still end up with what I had:
Your old OS drive will create a backup partition (around 17 GB) and you will have to use some partition software to merge that with rest of HDD space.
I have 3 drives so this wasn't a problem - I moved everything from my old OS drive to 3rd drive, formatted 2nd one and run partition software.
I had to go into BIOS to setup SSD as new boot device, took me a minute and voila, job done :)
Now my PC goes to Win 8 Pro log-in screen in 5 seconds after I click the power button :)

Good luck with your build mate.
 
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