Upgrading from HDD to SSD on Dell T7500

[SHolm4]

Hello all;

I bought an Intel SSD 535 series 240GB and want to load everything onto it, and convert the old drives into storage only and "unraid" them.

Goal:

Load the Opsys (make it the boot drive) and all Data (total usage right now is ~180gb) on the SSD, making it the primary.

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System: Xeon W5580 @3.2GHz (twin CPU's); RAM: 12GB; W7 Pro 64 bit, SP1; WinExp index: 7.1

Currently, the machine is set up using the LSI 1068e SAS/SATA controller. It contains 2 physical HDD's set up in a RAID 0 configuration. The 2 show up in diskmgmt as a single virtual disk.

Problems:

I created a system image and recovery disk prior to making any changes, then installed the SSD using SATA connector 0, which required moving the 2 original drives (2 physical> 1 virtual) from SATA 0&1 to SATA 1&2.

Formatted the new SSD, followed all of the instructions in diskmgmt and did a clone of the old drive using EaseUS Todo Backup Free 8.6. All seemed to go smoothly until I changed the boot sequence to the SSD. The machine booted fine, and I was all smiles.

Until I started running some applications.... the system seemed like it had many missing pieces, programs were complaining about not being able to find this or that etc.

So Einstein here (me) decided to try & use the recovery disk & do a system restore to the SSD. Well, that was a total bust. I got a message from Windows that said "No disk that can be used for recovering the system can be found". (Apologies for the insult to Einstein here). My guess is that the new SSD is not set up the same as the originals, but who knows.

I decided to play with the SSD for a while, run some benchmarks etc. Windows experience index on the SSD dropped from 7.5 to 7.1. That was the point where I decided to reach out to the community to find a solution.

Thanks in advance for any/all suggestions that you can send my way. IMHO, this base system is still worth keeping/upgrading when compared to a new gaming rig at around ~$7k.

All the best,

Steve

[jbenavides]

Here are a few links that will help you obtain more information about this process and how to manage your system:

*NOTE: These links are being offered for your convenience and should not be viewed as an endorsement by Intel of the content, products, or services offered there.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/index.html Acronis Customer Support product documentation

ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/all-products/esuprt_electronics/esuprt_software/esuprt_stor_sys_mgmt/dell... Dell* SAS RAID Storage Manager User's Guide

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/precision-t7500/drivers Precision T7500 Support | Dell US