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Setting up a new SSD

spdfreak

spdfreak

Senior member
I just bought a 240GB Crucial M500 on one of NE special deals and I want to set it up as my OS drive. Currently I have a 1TB OS drive (win7pro) and 2TB and 3TB storage drives. MB is a Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3. They are all in IDE mode currently but I will need to set it to AHCI for the SSD. My question is what will happen to the 2 and 3 TB drives when I switch to AHCI? Will the system still see them or do I need to somehow reconfigure them?

I think I will do a clean install of win7 with no other drives connected and then copy stuff I want off the old OS drive and then use it as a backup drive. Any suggestions for optimizing/streamlining this process?
 
Simplify.

The 2TB and 3TB are storage? Unplug them. Use your computer. If things are ok. Leave it unplugged. Now all you have to deal with is obviously fitting your 1TB OS onto your SSD.

But if you prefer to do a clean install then just unplug all drives. Plug the SSD in and install with ACHI. Now plug the 2TB and find out what happens. Let us know!
 
spdfreak said:
I just bought a 240GB Crucial M500 on one of NE special deals and I want to set it up as my OS drive. Currently I have a 1TB OS drive (win7pro) and 2TB and 3TB storage drives. MB is a Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3. They are all in IDE mode currently but I will need to set it to AHCI for the SSD. My question is what will happen to the 2 and 3 TB drives when I switch to AHCI? Will the system still see them or do I need to somehow reconfigure them?
Click to expand...
They'll work the same. AHCI doesn't change anything about data access, but rather, gets Windows to turn on some features not enabled in IDE mode, in regards to the controller. You should have had AHCI on prior, as NCQ makes a huge difference with HDDs.

I think I will do a clean install of win7 with no other drives connected and then copy stuff I want off the old OS drive and then use it as a backup drive. Any suggestions for optimizing/streamlining this process?
Click to expand...
Not really. I did that, then took ownership of my old user directory from the new install, and went from there.
 
Cerb said:
They'll work the same. AHCI doesn't change anything about data access, but rather, gets Windows to turn on some features not enabled in IDE mode, in regards to the controller. You should have had AHCI on prior, as NCQ makes a huge difference with HDDs.
Click to expand...

So, If I turn on AHCI to install the new SSD, I'll still be able to boot to the old OS drive without problems? I ask because I won't have time to do everything at once so I'll need to boot to the old drive to get work done while I gradually get everything installed on the new drive.
 
spdfreak said:
So, If I turn on AHCI to install the new SSD, I'll still be able to boot to the old OS drive without problems? I ask because I won't have time to do everything at once so I'll need to boot to the old drive to get work done while I gradually get everything installed on the new drive.
Click to expand...
Not quite. First, change the "Start" value in the following registry keys from 3 to 0:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IastorV (this only exists if you have Intel's drivers installed)

Then, reboot, turn on AHCI in the BIOS, and you should be able to reboot into Windows. Then, go about installing the SSD. You should turn AHCI on because NCQ has been a performance enhancing feature for any drive in stone stock Windows since 2009, not just because you got an SSD.
 
Glad I asked... it worked perfect, thanks. Now on to the new drive! Is there a better way than Acronis to do backups for the whole drive? I have plenty of space on the 2TB drive to make a backup partition.
 
Pretty much finished... It is faster, but not mind-bogglingly faster as some people would have you think. On SSD's I guess there is no purpose in defragging but is TRIM an automatic thing or do I need to schedule it? I checked and it is enabled...
 
With a lone OS of Windows 7, no worries. It's automatic. It should run during low-activity times shortly after doing some deleting.
 
spdfreak said:
Glad I asked... it worked perfect, thanks. Now on to the new drive! Is there a better way than Acronis to do backups for the whole drive? I have plenty of space on the 2TB drive to make a backup partition.
Click to expand...

Acronis works, but I hear fewer complaints and confusion when using Macrium Reflect Free Edition.

You don't have to make a backup partition. The backup image file is just a file and can be stored like any other.

Re performance. I'd probably check that alignment is proper on the SSD. It should be by default, but I'd check regardless. You can do that with a benchmarking app or with diskpart or likely a command of some kind.
 
ignatzatsonic said:
Acronis works, but I hear fewer complaints and confusion when using Macrium Reflect Free Edition.

You don't have to make a backup partition. The backup image file is just a file and can be stored like any other.
Click to expand...

Acronis works in the same way... it just creates a file on whatever hard drive you aim it at. Personally, I backup my system every night using the full method, it works very well... and I have had occasion to use it to recover a dead SSD.
 
I have Acronis installed so I will just use it, I think. There is plenty of space on the 2TB drive. I'm guessing that just reading from the SSD to do the backup doesn't cause any degradation?
 
I wouldn't worry about degradation in the least.

I would worry to some degree that the imaging/restoration process would fail for whatever reason. It isn't foolproof and you need to know what you'll do when it fails. Otherwise, you're just walking around thinking you are protected when you aren't.

You should confirm for a fact that whatever boot disk you may make to boot from to restore the image file does in fact boot the PC. That's probably the biggest point of failure--usually due to driver issues, particularly if the boot disc is Linux-based.
 
here's the results of the disc alignment test...
disc 0 is the SSD
disc 1 is the old 1TB OS drive
disc 2 is the 3TB storage drive- mostly recorded TV
disc 3 is a 2TB drive partitioned into 2 1TB partitions

512 0 Disk #0, Partition #0 1048576
512 1 Disk #0, Partition #1 105906176
512 0 Disk #1, Partition #0 1048576
512 1 Disk #1, Partition #1 105906176
512 0 Disk #3, Partition #0 1048576
512 1 Disk #3, Partition #1 1000199946240
512 0 Disk #2, Partition #0 135266304
 
I suspect it's OK, but those results are from a program with which I have no familiarity.

If you could run Diskpart and enter these commands, I could tell:

From a command prompt:

diskpart

list disk

select disk 0 (based on your above post, that should be the SSD)

list partition

You should then see something like this:

Partition 1 Primary 223GB 1024kb

The number before the kb is the offset and needs to be divisible by 4.

You may instead see something like this:

Partition 200 mb 1024kb

and then another partition of maybe 223 gb with an offset of 101 mb

That's OK too. (101 is not divisible by 4, but when you multiply it by 1024 to convert to kb, the result is 103424kb, which is divisible by 4.)
 
spdfreak said:
512 0 disk #0, partition #0 1048576
512 1 disk #0, partition #1 105906176
512 0 disk #1, partition #0 1048576
512 1 disk #1, partition #1 105906176
512 0 disk #3, partition #0 1048576
512 1 disk #3, partition #1 1000199946240
512 0 disk #2, partition #0 135266304
Click to expand...
1MB = 2^20B = 1048576B
105906176B/2^20B/MB = 101MB
1000199946240B/2^20B/MB = 9653865MB
135266304B/2^20B/MB = 129MB

All aligned to at least 1MB.
 
So, I've been using this drive for a few weeks now and all seems good except for a couple of times when the system has become unresponsive and the HD light is on solid for about 30-60 sec. Then it goes back to normal.This was when I was actually working and using the system. I have no automatic back-up set and wasn't doing anything unusual. Could this have been the TRIM or should I look for other problems? It has never done this before installing the SSD.
 
If deleting large quantities is common, yes, it could be TRIM. You can Google for how to turn it off, and then see if it does it over some period of time. TRIM was rather poorly implemented, though most of us don't notice, as Windows tries to use times of no or very low IO to run it, if it can.
 
Well, it just did the lock-up thing again for 30-60 sec. Wouldn't even respond to ctr-alt-delete. As near as I can tell, this is what was happening at the time from the event log- I don't know what any of this means but maybe someone here can decipher it...

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued.

- System

- Provider

[ Name] amd_sata

- EventID 129

[ Qualifiers] 32772

Level 3

Task 0

Keywords 0x80000000000000

- TimeCreated

[ SystemTime] 2014-04-18T22:47:32.578012700Z

EventRecordID 10840

Channel System

Computer Office

Security


- EventData

\Device\RaidPort0
0F001800010000000000000081000480040000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000810004800000000000000000


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Binary data:


In Words

0000: 0018000F 00000001 00000000 80040081
0008: 00000004 00000000 00000000 00000000
0010: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
0018: 00000000 80040081 00000000 00000000


In Bytes

0000: 0F 00 18 00 01 00 00 00 ........
0008: 00 00 00 00 81 00 04 80 ......€
0010: 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0028: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0030: 00 00 00 00 81 00 04 80 ......€
0038: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
 
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