Migrating Vista to a faster hdd.

Wiggins · 25 Apr 2008 at 18:27

OK, I have had Vista Ultimate running for 26 days now and i'm happy with it so will take the plunge and scrap XP.

Vista was installed on an old 80Gb IDE with 2Mb Cache and I want to put it on an 80Gb Sata 8mb Cache just for the little extra performance increase on load times etc....

Now I know that XP was quite a doddle at copying to another drive with 3rd party apps but i'm a little unsure as to whether this counts the same for Vista.

Has anyone tried this and what apps have they used to do it with?

Another quick question is if I do a fresh install, would I get any performance increase installing the 64bit version instead of the 32bit version as I only have 2GB of RAM and will not be looking to purchase any more in the distant future?

Your feedback is appreciated

BigBoy · 25 Apr 2008 at 20:51

Somthing like Acronis true image will do the job as you are performing a complete sector copy of the drive and not just parts of the drive!

brendy · 25 Apr 2008 at 22:29

changing to the 8mb cache wont make any noticeable difference, to make it a belter you need faster rpm drives and 16mb cache.

Uhtred · 26 Apr 2008 at 01:21

Not true, there will be a higher transfer disk because it's a newer drive. Worth the effort. Acronis works well, i've done it a couple of times.

Tute · 26 Apr 2008 at 01:59

If you do a fresh install, be prepared that you'll have to ring up to get it re-activated.

Not a problem, but an image of the drive won't require this.

coupe69 · 26 Apr 2008 at 02:44

The latest version of Ghost work's fine with vista too. In fact I think it's worked since about version 12.1

bledd · 26 Apr 2008 at 10:05

if i were you, i'd spend £50 on a 500gb drive, the newer drives are a lot faster, and quieter

siege2 · 26 Apr 2008 at 10:30

I did exactly what the op "said,wants" but I used acronis to clone one raid 0 setup to another faster raid 0 setup then unplugged source hd's then made destination hd's the 0 and 1 on the sata controller, just install acronis then get it to make a boot up cd the go from there.

Wiggins · 26 Apr 2008 at 10:34

Well as it was not activated and only used within the 30 days trial, I decided on a fresh install.

It went very well with no hiccups. The speed is noticably faster with regards to boot times and transfer speeds. I'm not looking into getting a bigger, faster drive at present as I have nearly 500gb for storage and 80gb is enough for now with an OS on.

I have had a good friendship over the past few years with a few guys in the sales/marketing team for Microsoft so managed to get a very good price on Vista Ultimate Retail so re-activation is not a problem when I move to a bigger hard drive.