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How to install SSD?

A

andrewboon

Member
Hi I just got my 64 GB Crucial M4 in the mail and I have it installed inside my computer. I hooked up the SATA cable into my SATA III port and now I am set. But I was wondering if there's anything I need to do in the BIOS? Like to setup trim or RAID? I'm not exactly sure what trim and RAID are, I just know that they're important when it comes to setting up a SSD/HDD. I'll only be using this SSD along with a 5200 RPM 250 GB Hard drive. Thank you for your help!
 
Yes, before you install Windows go into your BIOS and make sure your SATA connection is set to either AHCI or RAID mode. If you have it in IDE compatibility mode, then you'll cripple the performance of your SSD (I think that's what the implication is... at any rate, AHCI/RAID is the recommended mode). Some motherboards don't have an AHCI mode, they just have a RAID mode that is equivalent to AHCI, so don't sweat it if you only see one or the other.

TRIM is something Windows handles automatically. If you're installing Windows from scratch, just tell the Windows installer to use the whole SSD and it'll handle everything for you. Ignore all the SSD-optimization stuff you may read around the 'net, other than maybe disabling hibernation. Everything else is a waste of time.
 
LokutusofBorg said:
Yes, before you install Windows go into your BIOS and make sure your SATA connection is set to either AHCI or RAID mode. If you have it in IDE compatibility mode, then you'll cripple the performance of your SSD (I think that's what the implication is... at any rate, AHCI/RAID is the recommended mode). Some motherboards don't have an AHCI mode, they just have a RAID mode that is equivalent to AHCI, so don't sweat it if you only see one or the other.

TRIM is something Windows handles automatically. If you're installing Windows from scratch, just tell the Windows installer to use the whole SSD and it'll handle everything for you. Ignore all the SSD-optimization stuff you may read around the 'net, other than maybe disabling hibernation. Everything else is a waste of time.
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Okay thank you very much. What is hibernation btw?
 
There is sleep mode, where most of your computer shuts off, but the RAM stays powered, so you get almost instant-on.

There is shutdown, where Windows closes out and your computer completely turns off.

Then there is hibernation where Windows saves the RAM state to disk before it lets the computer turn off. When you resume from hibernation, you don't have to go through the full boot process, Windows just reads itself back off disk. It's halfway between sleep and full shutdown. But you get a hiberfil.sys file on your C: drive as large as your RAM. Disabling hibernation lets you delete that file, which can be a good thing to do if you have a small SSD and you don't want to use hibernation.
 
LokutusofBorg - are you in the camp of not disabling prefetch and superfetch? Both Intel and Samsung recommend you do.

Andrew, one other thing, never defrag it. SSDs work entirely different to HDDs so they do not need defragging. Continue to defrag your HDD though.
 
Coup27 said:
LokutusofBorg - are you in the camp of not disabling prefetch and superfetch? Both Intel and Samsung recommend you do.

Andrew, one other thing, never defrag it. SSDs work entirely different to HDDs so they do not need defragging. Continue to defrag your HDD though.
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Windows 7 knows very well how to handle an SSD. There is no reason to manually muck with SuperFetch, Defrag, or anything of the sort. It's all automatic.
 
I disagree. I have setup 5 else 6 systems now with an SSD and Windows has never disabled prefetch, superfetch or defrag.

Someone suggested it is because I didn't run WEI before manually disabling them. I built my new setup the other weekend and the first thing I did after installing was to run WEI and reboot. I then installed all the chipset and RST drivers, rebooted, WEI again, reboot. Prefetch, superfetch and defrag were all still enabled.
 
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Remember that Windows wont disable the entire service because you might have mechanical drives connected to your computer. However, that doesnt mean it runs those services on the SSDs. It probably skips them.

I think we dont give Windows enough credit for things like this.
 
AFAIK Windows queries the rotation speed of drives and it’ll never defrag anything that returns 0 (i.e. an SSD or other flash based medium). That’s also how it knows to enable TRIM.
 
Ancalagon44 said:
Remember that Windows wont disable the entire service because you might have mechanical drives connected to your computer. However, that doesnt mean it runs those services on the SSDs. It probably skips them.
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Prefetch or superfetch would have no purpose on a secondary mechanical drive with no OS installed. Theres a few MSDN articles and the MS reps on their forums all confirm these services should be disabled when an SSD is detected.
 
Coup27 said:
Prefetch or superfetch would have no purpose on a secondary mechanical drive with no OS installed. Theres a few MSDN articles and the MS reps on their forums all confirm these services should be disabled when an SSD is detected.
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I'm sorry, but you really don't know what you're talking about. The official Windows 7 blog had (still does) lots of good info on SSDs. Those articles, combined with Anand's main SSD articles, give enough information for anyone to gain expert-level knowledge on SSDs. (Nowhere in any of them is it recommended to try to manually muck with these things.) Also, most of the people responding on MSDN forums are MVPs, not MS employees. Even if they were, the forums would not be authoritative over the official Windows 7 blog where senior developers and program managers who know what the hell they're talking about have posted the official MS position on these things.
 
I have read many of these blogs and also Anands articles. I am aware that Windows should manage these settings automatically when detecting an SSD but, at least according to the registry entries and 2 SSD toolboxes, it doesn't.

You can make out I don't know what I'm doing, but you cannot dispute that Intel, Samsung and OCZ all officially claim that superfetch and prefetch should be disabled. Intel and Samsung have also gone to the length of including a feature within their SSD toolboxes to not only check if it's been disabled, but to also disable it for you if it hasn't. If all was perfect within Windows SSD management why would they go to this trouble?
 
LokutusofBorg said:
TRIM is something only Windows 7 handles automatically. If you're installing Windows from scratch, just tell the Windows installer to use the whole SSD and it'll handle everything for you. Ignore all the SSD-optimization stuff you may read around the 'net, other than maybe disabling hibernation. Everything else is a waste of time.
Click to expand...

Fixed for you.
 
You're making a mountain out of a molehill with this stuff... If Windows wasn't enabling TRIM, or it was running defrag on your SSD then you'd have something with some meat here. If you had a fresh Windows install on a high-end SSD and you were seeing *none* of the SSD optimizations handled automatically by Windows, you'd have something.

Superfetch is a speed optimization that has one single downfall: it uses slightly more power by keeping more data in your RAM. How in the world does leaving Superfetch enabled on a system with an SSD hurt your performance or do anything even remotely negative besides the (slightly) higher power draw I just mentioned?

The Windows 7 blog has some very clear information about what Windows does and doesn't do in regards to optimizing itself for an SSD. They found that going too far with optimizations was actually harmful in lots of cases. Therefore Windows doesn't turn on all optimizations for all SSDs.

If you're not installing Windows 7 fresh onto a "good" SSD then all bets are off. If you think you know better how to optimize your system for an SSD than the teams of engineers and testers at Microsoft then have at it (you may be! but enjoy your circa 1998 MS-sucks-paranoia). But you're doing this community a disservice by trying to push this stuff as something all users should be doing. I dare say 99% of users should install fresh, partition their whole SSD, and forget about it.
 
LokutusofBorg said:
You're making a mountain out of a molehill with this stuff... If Windows wasn't enabling TRIM, or it was running defrag on your SSD then you'd have something with some meat here. If you had a fresh Windows install on a high-end SSD and you were seeing *none* of the SSD optimizations handled automatically by Windows, you'd have something.

Superfetch is a speed optimization that has one single downfall: it uses slightly more power by keeping more data in your RAM. How in the world does leaving Superfetch enabled on a system with an SSD hurt your performance or do anything even remotely negative besides the (slightly) higher power draw I just mentioned?

The Windows 7 blog has some very clear information about what Windows does and doesn't do in regards to optimizing itself for an SSD. They found that going too far with optimizations was actually harmful in lots of cases. Therefore Windows doesn't turn on all optimizations for all SSDs.

If you're not installing Windows 7 fresh onto a "good" SSD then all bets are off. If you think you know better how to optimize your system for an SSD than the teams of engineers and testers at Microsoft then have at it (you may be! but enjoy your circa 1998 MS-sucks-paranoia). But you're doing this community a disservice by trying to push this stuff as something all users should be doing. I dare say 99% of users should install fresh, partition their whole SSD, and forget about it.
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I have a 2600K system now with twin 1TB drives, each partitioned to 60GB for OS and the rest for my Data.

I've always wondered if I went and found a good buy on an SSD, what is entailed with installing it? I thought I could just use Easeus disc clone to clone the OS partition to the SSD (or use Macrium or Easeus imaging to load an image of it to the SSD).

Are you saying that I'll need to re-install Win 7 and all of my programs again?

I haven't bothered to spend the money on SSD yet only because nobody in my house really cares whether it takes 10 seconds or 41 seconds to boot up the PC once per day. I care most about speed on video editing and rendering, but an SSD doesn't help too much there unless you spend the time to move the active video files over to the SSD and then run the rendering output also to the SSD, but then you still need to copy over the final file to the regular HDD again anyway.
 
I've always (12+ years in the computer industry) been of the mind to reinstall Windows fresh. I have never actively used an imaging program. I see no need. The benefits of a clean install are always compelling enough for it to be the obvious choice for me. With an SSD, there are simply *more* reasons a fresh install is the right choice. I upgrade my computer once every 1.5 to 2 years and I always install fresh.

Is it a bit of a PITA? Yes, for a couple days I have to install all kinds of stuff that I already had installed. Is it worth it? Overwhelmingly, yes.

Is it the right answer for everybody? No. But if you're imaging over to an SSD you'd better know what you're doing. The pain of installing programs and configuring all your stuff is immeasurably less than the pain of an improperly installed/configured SSD.
 
how about if im reinstalling Windows 7 on an SSD? A quick format is enough? or a full format? I'm getting a new mobo so just wanna be safe and reinstall windows 7 from scratch.🙂
 
Hogan773 said:
I have a 2600K system now with twin 1TB drives, each partitioned to 60GB for OS and the rest for my Data.

I've always wondered if I went and found a good buy on an SSD, what is entailed with installing it? I thought I could just use Easeus disc clone to clone the OS partition to the SSD (or use Macrium or Easeus imaging to load an image of it to the SSD).

Are you saying that I'll need to re-install Win 7 and all of my programs again?

I haven't bothered to spend the money on SSD yet only because nobody in my house really cares whether it takes 10 seconds or 41 seconds to boot up the PC once per day. I care most about speed on video editing and rendering, but an SSD doesn't help too much there unless you spend the time to move the active video files over to the SSD and then run the rendering output also to the SSD, but then you still need to copy over the final file to the regular HDD again anyway.
Click to expand...

For video editing you might be better off adding an SSD as a non-system drive: "Specify your fastest hard disks for capturing footage and storing scratch files." [1] However, others recommend avoiding SSDs for video editing (although their arguments are questionable in places). [2]

[1] http://help.adobe.com/en_US/premierepro/cs/using/WS369BD79A-5DF9-48d8-9F49-6B56026087C8.html
[2] http://forums.adobe.com/message/3921657

Credit to jhansman for posting a similar comment in another thread.

jhansman said:
One note for Photoshop users (from Adobe's site):

Solid-state disks

Installing Photoshop on a solid-state disk (SSD) allows Photoshop to launch fast, probably in less than a second. But that speedier startup is the only time savings you experience, because that’s the only time when much data is read from the SSD.

To gain the greatest benefit from an SSD, use it as the scratch disk. Using it as a scratch disk gives you significant performance improvements if you have images that don’t fit entirely in RAM. For example, swapping tiles between RAM and an SSD is much faster than swapping between RAM and a hard disk.

If your SSD doesn’t have much free space (if the scratch file grows bigger than can fit on the SSD), you can add a secondary or tertiary hard disk (after the SSD).

Also, SSDs vary widely in performance, much more so than hard disks. Using an earlier, slower drive results in little improvement over a hard disk.

Note: Adding RAM to improve performance is more cost effective than purchasing an SSD. If money is no object, you're maxed out on installed RAM for your computer, you run Photoshop CS5 as a 64-bit application, and you still want to improve performance, then consider using a solid-state disk as your scratch disk.
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poohbear said:
how about if im reinstalling Windows 7 on an SSD? A quick format is enough? or a full format? I'm getting a new mobo so just wanna be safe and reinstall windows 7 from scratch.🙂
Click to expand...

When I install Windows 7 I don't tell it to create partitions or format or anything anymore. I just choose the option that says use this empty drive here. It handles everything. When I've reinstalled on an SSD that already had Windows on it, I use the installer disk options to delete all partitions, and then again just tell it to use that big empty drive there. It creates the needed partitions and formats as it wants.
 
Coup27 said:
Prefetch or superfetch would have no purpose on a secondary mechanical drive with no OS installed.
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That's not true at all. Superfetch is basically a pre-loading disk cache for commonly used applications. So if you're launching applications installed onto secondary drives then it’ll benefit things.

The drive type for Superfetch is irrelevant; the only conceivable scenario were the system was disadvantaged was if the drive was the same speed (or faster) than system RAM (e.g. a RAM disk). But I’m sure Windows is smart enough not to superfetch from RAM disks, and no drive will ever be faster than system RAM.
 
LokutusofBorg said:
When I install Windows 7 I don't tell it to create partitions or format or anything anymore. I just choose the option that says use this empty drive here. It handles everything. When I've reinstalled on an SSD that already had Windows on it, I use the installer disk options to delete all partitions, and then again just tell it to use that big empty drive there. It creates the needed partitions and formats as it wants.
Click to expand...

ok thanks. So delete the partition (the SSD only has 1 partition), and choose to install on the deleted partition. Win7 takes care of the rest & automatically formats if needed? Is formating a SSD bad for an SSD?
 
This thread went south somewhere.. lolol Lets stop beating the dead donkey...

To the OP, yes what you want to do is make sure you have the latest firmware installed so you dont get issues with the SSD. Search for M4 Crucial firmware and download it and install it. Cuz these SSDs some of them just die suddenly after a month, and the firmware upgrade fixes this.... thx gl
 
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