F-this! Reformatting my HD in an hour or two and starting new. Advice?

[clublights]

NO matter the OS you choose... if your machine and wallet... can handle it .. get an SSD drive... the speed jump is AMAZING. you wouldn;t think it would be that big of a deal but boy is it ever.

Worth every dime .

[Jer]

NO matter the OS you choose... if your machine and wallet... can handle it .. get an SSD drive... the speed jump is AMAZING. you wouldn;t think it would be that big of a deal but boy is it ever.

Worth every dime .

Just make sure you install a FRESH version of the OS from the M$ website. You don't want to copy your existing OS from an HDD to an SSD. To give you an idea, I got a brand new Lenovo and installed a fresh copy of Win7 onto the HDD and a boot up too about 2min. I then installed an entry-level SSD into the same laptop, installed a fresh copy of Win7 and now it REboots in less than 30 seconds including manually typing in my password. Insane. I also tested Photoshop before and after and before it took about 40 seconds to fully launch and be ready to use. Same thing with the SSD is done in 8 seconds. Unreal. Keep in mind this is a basic SSD and a basic laptop too.

[blacklabel]

What size are SSDs coming in now? I've always shied away because of the limited capacity in the past.

[Jer]

What size are SSDs coming in now? I've always shied away because of the limited capacity in the past.

Relatively affordable 500GB options are on the market. The 64's, 120's and so on are getting wildly cheap these days. Love it!

Edit: Size shouldn't be too much of a factor though. No need to have massive SSDs for the purpose of storage because unless you're doing lots of reading & writing you won't ever get the performance gains. You want your OS, programs and a couple other things on the SSD for quick access. Then just get a standard HDD for your storage needs.

[cfortune]

Just make sure you install a FRESH version of the OS from the M$ website. You don't want to copy your existing OS from an HDD to an SSD. To give you an idea, I got a brand new Lenovo and installed a fresh copy of Win7 onto the HDD and a boot up too about 2min. I then installed an entry-level SSD into the same laptop, installed a fresh copy of Win7 and now it REboots in less than 30 seconds including manually typing in my password. Insane. I also tested Photoshop before and after and before it took about 40 seconds to fully launch and be ready to use. Same thing with the SSD is done in 8 seconds. Unreal. Keep in mind this is a basic SSD and a basic laptop too.

I've never had an issue using something like Acronis true image to move from spinning disk to SSD. Granted I've only made that move twice.

[Gman]

If you want an imaging/cloning tool that can also be used for backups, etc., check out Macrium Reflect.

If you move from a HDD to a SSD, make sure you reconfigure the OS for the new media. There are numerous websites that illustrate tweaks to disable indexing, defragmentation, SuperFetch, prefetch, etc. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2727880

I bought multiple OCZ SATA 3 240GB 2.5" SSDs. They work well and the size is very accommodating to the apps that we use. In our desktops, we use the SSD as a boot drive for the OS and applications and also have a SATA 3 HDD for occasional storage. Almost the entirety of our important stuff is kept on a home server.

[mitch]

One more thing to note: If the machine is more than about 18 months old and you are having more frequent OS crashes, replace the ram along with the hard drive. Yes, memory goes bad and I doubt you are running a "business class" computer with ECC memory. Here's the study Google did across their tens of thousands of in-house computers showing error rates averaged across each stick of memory. On average you will see 400 corrected errors per dimm per year, and they get worse starting about 10-18 months. http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~bianca/pa...gmetrics09.pdf

[Jer]

I've never had an issue using something like Acronis true image to move from spinning disk to SSD. Granted I've only made that move twice.

As long as you realign the SSD afterwards you should be okay and won't notice much of a fall off in performance. There are a few things that Win7 & Win8 do when being freshly installed on an SSD that are unique to HDD installation to take advantage of the way that SSDs go about things. Some of these can repaired afterwards but I've found it's just easier to suggest the average user do a fresh OS install.

[cfortune]

As long as you realign the SSD afterwards you should be okay and won't notice much of a fall off in performance. There are a few things that Win7 & Win8 do when being freshly installed on an SSD that are unique to HDD installation to take advantage of the way that SSDs go about things. Some of these can repaired afterwards but I've found it's just easier to suggest the average user do a fresh OS install.

I hear ya.

Plus if their BIOS was set to use their drives as IDE versus AHCI then they'll have to reformat if they move to AHCI. I'm not 100% on this being true for all SSDs but I know my first SSD highly suggested AHCI over IDE.

[Jer]

I hear ya.

Plus if their BIOS was set to use their drives as IDE versus AHCI then they'll have to reformat if they move to AHCI. I'm not 100% on this being true for all SSDs but I know my first SSD highly suggested AHCI over IDE.

There are a few more technical aspects to a SSD swap that I wasn't going to get into on a firearms forum. Sure, you can just copy shit over and call it a day and you'll still have performance gains over what you have with an HDD. The best advice I can give is make sure your BIOS is set to AHCI and then load a fresh copy of your OS onto the SSD and activate with your key through the normal process. Then install the drivers and prepare to be blown away by the performance. It's awesome!