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Sanity check before installing boot SSD

M

marcplante

Senior member
I am getting ready to install a 128GB Crucial M4 SSD in my PC as a boot and app drive. I trimmed all of the noise off of my hard drive including media and even the couple games I use for now. I am at an indicated 107GB, though my actual file estimate is about 75 GB (recovery space, I presume). I was going to use The Western Digital Edition of Acronis true image to clone my HD to the SSD.

The SSD is brand new. Any considerations around formatting, etc before I install? the Crucial online video seems to indicate just clone and go.

Yes, it seems like I've almost outgrown this already, but I figure I can hand it down to my mother once I've worked through the kinks of setup. She has very nominal web surfing requirements on her PC, so a 128 GB drive should be plenty big and fast for her.

Thanks,
 
If you do a direct clone, your partition alignment will likely be wrong, and this will negatively affect the SSD's performance.
 
Agree with Eug. If you have only 75 gb of stuff why not just do a clean install of Windows and software on the new drive?
 
I've been spending a bit too much time moving files on and off computers and rebuilding lately and am a little burnt out and feeling lazy. I just went through two new notebook computers that required several RMAs that kept coming back loaded with shovelware and broken. Still, I suppose a clean start is always nice. I just need to assure I have the install bits for everything on the original box. Some of the stuff I have is fairly heavily patched which is always annoying to rebuild (I don't have an SP1 Win7 image). I thought bypassing some of that noise was what image copying was about.

I also figured that WD/Acronis would know how to do this.
 
If you do a direct clone and then correct the partition alignment after the fact, that could work too. That would save a lot of time, and a lot of people here have had success doing it this way. However, I tried that once, and it must have screwed something up, because my WiFi stopped working properly. ie. WiFi on the direct clone (with Acronis) worked, but the drive was misaligned, and performance was slow. After the alignment, everything but WiFi worked properly. A reinstall of Win 7 from scratch (which provides the correct alignment) worked fine for everything. Fortunately, OS and software installs on SSD go much faster than on hard drives, esp. if your CPU is up to the task.

Mind you, if this is for your mom, she probably wouldn't even notice the difference. All she'd notice is that it's hella fast compared to a regular drive, even without the correct alignment.
 
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If I'm not mistaken, Acronis handles partition alignment...

I used Acronis Home 2012 twice to clone HDD to SSD, and SSD to SSD and it worked fine both times.
 
I think I'm going to give the Acronis utility a shot and see how it works. I'm doing this mainly for snappy desktop performance jumping in and out of the core application group. Given the configuration I have, the majority of the significant reading would be on an adjoining 7200 RPM drive so, I don't know if absolute performance is going to be critical to me at this phase.

Also, if the copy doesn't take, I can always rebuild from scratch as a second step. The copy should be a half hour process, total. Patching would be a few hours of downloading and installing different bits, then picking through backups to grab configuration and preference files, etc. all of the issues associated with not maintaining a proper backup.

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I originally bought this to put in my mother's computer to make her general surfing experience more "entertaining." She is 83 and fairly tech averse, and I thought giving her a PC that did everything quickly might make her more apt to use it.

Problem is, I have short windows of time to set her up, so I want to do a dry run of an SSD setup on my own box to know that I'll be able to do it with absolutely no head scratching when I get to her house.

Overall, while I'm usually willing and happy to do the detailed technical work (on both PCs and cars), I find my family life is changing the logistics of being able to do so
 
The key to correct cloning alignment with True Image is to use the latest two versions (2012 or 2013.) They work perfectly. I've done it on two Samsung 830s.

Another thing that helps insure correct cloning is to use bootable TI media - I have it on a Thumb drive. That way nothing in Windows can get in the way.
 
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I have an extra drive in the tower that has a copy of Win7 on it. (32 bit version for certain apps I run). i can boot from that drive and run the clone from there. Thanks for the heads up.

I'll try it tonight if I can get the kids down before I drop from exhaustion.
 
One thing you will want to be careful of doing is filling too much of the SSD up. You will want at least 25% of it free to keep the performance up. Anand has said so himself on a number of occasions on this website. I would hesitate to put 100+GB on a 128GB SSD. Even if your data is a little under 80 GB, it's still something you should keep an eye on.
 
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