topic Re: Question about moving from HDD to SSD in Archive

Question about moving from HDD to SSD

idata — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 19:29:08 GMT

If there is an obvious answer to this question, I've yet to find it and hope someone here will straighten me out.

I want to use a hard disk to intall Windows 7 and updates and programs and files and tweaking etc. etc. and then migrate this arrangement to my new Intel 510 120Gb SSD. I figure this would be better than starting my SSD by beating the heck out of it what with all the tweaking that is needed to get a new system running.

My question is: once I've cloned the HDD to the SSD, will W7 then recognize that I am running an SSD, and all that implies (best example: TRIM)???

I guess I expect the answer to be YES given that so many times SSDs are implemented as upgrades to existing systems, but wanted to confirm this.

If the answer is NO, then is the solution to immediately run the Toolbox which will make sure I am set properly?

Re: Question about moving from HDD to SSD

idata — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:55:28 GMT

The answer is yes. A drive's capabilities are advertised by the drive firmware itself, not by the underlying data on the disk. SSDs advertise TRIM capability, MHDDs don't.

Re: Question about moving from HDD to SSD

idata — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 02:30:33 GMT

Thanks for that, but a followup for you or anyone here: is my idea to image-back from an HDD to the SSD a bad one? Better to just start-from-scratch installing W7 directly to the SSD?

Re: Question about moving from HDD to SSD

idata — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 06:33:39 GMT

You'll need to make sure that the software you use to mirror (migrate) data to the SSD can pre-align the partition to a 8KByte boundary, otherwise your performance will suffer (roughly 30% worse). On the other hand, if you do a fresh install of Windows 7 on the SSD, it should take care of the alignment issue for you.

If other folks more familiar with Windows 7 on SSDs could chime in here, I'd appreciate it. I mainly do XP.

Re: Question about moving from HDD to SSD

idata — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:57:18 GMT

For as much as I've read about "aligning the parttition" I don't know that I understand it. I'd been ASSuming that if I used Intel's Acronis-based utility to migrate an HDD setup to the SSD, that this would be taken care of for me.

Can someone with Windows 7 advise with authority: I would do best to do my fresh install directly to SSD as koitsu suggests?

Well, never mind I decided to install W7 from scratch and so far so good. Thanks koitsu for helping out!