Imaging an SSD (noob alert)

[George P Burdell]

Background:
My system currently looks like this:
400GB OS drive with W7 x64 (only ~40GB full after months of bloating)
400GB drive for torrents, downloads, STEAM games and other games
1.5TB - TV, music and other data
1.5TB - movies and other data

Every three weeks or so, I image my OS drive with Acronis 2010.

I'm getting an Intel x25-M G2 80GB SSD in a few weeks to use as an OS drive.

Questions:
I tried to understand partition alignment but didn't get far. If I do a clean install of Windows 7 on a virgin SSD, will the installer take care of alignment?

Once my system is up and running, I plan to use Acronis to image my SSD every 3-4 weeks. If I was to restore such an image back to my SSD, would it harm alignment?

 

[kmmatney]

I don't know for sure, but if Acronis has an option for a "sector-by-sctor" copy of the drive, then I wouldn't think restroing it would ruin the drive alignment.

I don't know about the alignment stuff - I sort of gave up on it with my last SSD. I recently put an Intel 40GB SSD in my wife's computer, and just used the Seagate Discwizard (a cut-down version of Acronis) to copy her system across and it worked fine (Windows XP). From what I've read, the alignment stuff was mainly needed for older SSDs, and having TRIM support in Windows 7 should elleviate much of the need for it. In my case, I just set the SSD toolbox to perform a manual TRIM every week.

 

[kmmatney]

I don't know for sure, but if Acronis has an option for a "sector-by-sctor" copy of the drive, then I wouldn't think restroing it would ruin the drive alignment.

I don't know about the alignment stuff - I sort of gave up on it with my last SSD. I recently put an Intel 40GB SSD in my wife's computer, and just used the Seagate Discwizard (a cut-down version of Acronis) to copy her system across and it worked fine (Windows XP). From what I've read, the alignment stuff was mainly needed for older SSDs, and having TRIM support in Windows 7 should elleviate much of the need for it. In my case, I just set the SSD toolbox to perform a manual TRIM every week.

Edit: Looking at the Acronis website - if you do a full disk backup, then all your alignments should be preserved. If you do a partition backup, then they won't be.

 

[Zap]

I don't know for sure, but if Acronis has an option for a "sector-by-sctor" copy of the drive, then I wouldn't think restroing it would ruin the drive alignment.

Wouldn't that make the backup as big as the drive being backed up?

Edit: Looking at the Acronis website - if you do a full disk backup, then all your alignments should be preserved. If you do a partition backup, then they won't be.

Thanks for the info. I've wondered that as well.