What to know for new SSD install

deadfolk

deadfolk

deadfolk

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Due to a HDD failure, I'm finally going SSD for my boot drive (Win 8.1 initially, will go to 10 later).

When the drive arrives, is there anything I need to do that is non-obvious?

I know about setting AHCI in the BIOS, but what about in Windows?
Do I need to:
disable/modify virtual memory?
disable defrag?
other things I haven't even considered?

Is Windows 8.1 intelligent enough to spot an SSD and just deal with all these kinds of things? Do the drivers and software from the manufacturer (Samsung in this case) manage all of this?

Perhaps there's a current guide or checklist floating around?

Any pointers would be most appreciated.
 
Commenting here so can jump to this thread through my statistics as I would like to know this too hopefully someone responds shortly?
 
I think windows 8.1 disables disk defrag, I had to manually turn it off on windows 7.

what size SSD are you getting? to save on space I disable system restore and remove all restore points to save on space, I lower down my page file to min of 1gb and max of 2GB and have 6GB of ram.

most of the tweaks are to save on disk space as the 500GB SSDs are still a fair bit (£150ish)

everything I do on my SSD is purely to save on space, you know about the ACHI mode, just do this before installing windows as it may not boot if changed after.

what SSD did you go for?
 
deadfolk said:
I'm getting a 500GB drive, but space will still be at a premium for me! :)
Click to expand...

fair enough, all depends on what your installing on it as some of the newer games take up a lot of space.

on my system when I do a clean install I do the following.

- disable system restore and clear restore points
- change virtual memory to min of 1GB and max of 2GB
- disable disk defag as I use W7
- run disk clean up to remove old updates updates.

and that it on mine, got a 250GB SSD x 2 as a OS drive and another as a games drive.
 
Perhaps I worded that badly - I meant that I'll still be struggling for space. I always have too many games installed at once!

Thanks for the tips. I'll be sure to check all that on mine. It will be a clean install, so I shouldn't have to worry about old updates initially.

Game-wise, I'll probably divide between the SSD and a spinny drive, perhaps shuffling them about from time to time. For Steam games, I'll use Game Save Manager to move and link the directories rather than Steam's inbuilt thing for installing on different drives, as it's easier to move them back and forth that way.
 
ED209 said:
- change virtual memory to min of 1GB and max of 2GB
.
Click to expand...

Got to be careful about that. I have two 290x in xfire and 12gb ram and setting my virtual memory that low caused crashes to desktop with out of memory messages.
 
you don't need to do anything tbh,just plug it in install windows to it,set ssd as first boot device

modern boards from p67 onwards default the sata ports to ahci anyway,windows will sort the rest out for you
 
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