How to change your OS drive? - to Intel SSD G1

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I have just bought a 1st gen Intel 80GB drive (yes I know, it does not support trim and so on... It was cheap and was what I could afford at the moment )

Searching the intel forums, I can see that this might be a bit more complex than I assumed.Basicly, I have the Gigabyte GA-X58A - UD3R 2.0 and the OS disk is now a 160GB 7200rpm drive.I also have a RAID 0 configuration with 2x Velociraptors, which I'm keeping How should I install the new SSD? 1) connect to what port? 2) start W7 as usual, and flash drive with new FW in W7? 3) how to (best) transfer the OS image from the existing OS drive? a) I have downloaded the Intel program for this (data mighration SW?) b) I also have a WHS server - I know I can use this to restore the computer image completely to the drive.4) how to setup in the BIOS? a) IDE mode? b) AHCI mode? (By the way - what is AHCI? )5) I see there is also some posts about registry changes for the IDE/AHCI part. Is it possible to do this before I install the SSD?

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I've installed it now - but is not "happy" about the speeds I get with HD Tune?

Did a run with both ATTO and HD Tune pro.

First with AHCI enabled, then with Raid enabled.

Results:

HD Tune Pro: INTEL SSDSA2MH080G1GC File Benchmark

Drive C:

File Size: 64 MB

Block size Read speed

0.5 KB 11687 KB/s1 KB 22441 KB/s2 KB 40681 KB/s4 KB 72083 KB/s8 KB 114692 KB/s16 KB 162116 KB/s32 KB 186515 KB/s64 KB 200009 KB/s128 KB 94637 KB/s256 KB 73575 KB/s512 KB 74384 KB/s1024 KB 66946 KB/s2048 KB 79359 KB/s4096 KB 165475 KB/s8192 KB 240802 KB/s

Block size Write speed

0.5 KB 8703 KB/s1 KB 13763 KB/s2 KB 23319 KB/s4 KB 44040 KB/s8 KB 31531 KB/s16 KB 27887 KB/s32 KB 33967 KB/s64 KB 35554 KB/s128 KB 36027 KB/s256 KB 38978 KB/s512 KB 40382 KB/s1024 KB 56613 KB/s2048 KB 66366 KB/s4096 KB 67929 KB/s8192 KB 82139 KB/s

I get better speeds from my Velociraptor Raid0 array (especially at the write part)

Have I done anything wrong?

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Pics blocked at work.

The important metrics are the small file performance. Your VRaptors were getting 13MB/s for 1KB files?

Since you have HD Tune Pro, run the random performance benchmarks. This is where SSDs shine (and consider that 90%+ of OS/app disk usage is random).

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Thanks both of you, I'll look into the "random test" part DuckieHo.

I'll just pressed "start", I can see now that this was with 64mb files or something?

Seems to be better results with the Raid controller enabled also (I can see somewhat better writing speeds on the SSD there)

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SSD speed with Raid controller enabled