Upgrading to SSD; current system has a conventional HD and a little mSATA SSD

[Banana]

My current system has a conventional 500GB drive and a 32GB SSD mSATA cache drive (Dell XPS laptop). I want to replace the conventional drive with an SSD.

My system shows the C: drive with ~200GB of stuff in it. There is also an E: drive which I assume is the 32GB SSD.

My plan is to clone the C: drive without having to reinstall anything. My questions are - Is there anything on the E: drive (the 32GB SSD) that I need to copy? And after I replace the conventional drive with the large SSD, what is the role of the little cache drive?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I thought, that with Intel's SRT technology, that the cache drive didn't show up as a separate drive letter. I believe that it treats the two drives like a specialized RAID-0 array, and there is only one drive letter.

I would do some further investigation as to what your E-colon drive is. (Card reader, perhaps?)

 

[WT]

I thought, that with Intel's SRT technology, that the cache drive didn't show up as a separate drive letter. I believe that it treats the two drives like a specialized RAID-0 array, and there is only one drive letter.

This. Something isn't right with his iRST setup if this is the case. It's easy enough to see - just open the RST app from the system tray and see if the 32GB is showing as a RAID0 cache volume and the SATA HDD is accelerated.

 

[vailr]

I suppose that your laptop may have been mis-configured at the factory. Before changing anything, make sure you have a bootable installation media for a fresh installation of the operating system, plus a copy of the product key. The mSATA drive should have been configured as the c: boot drive, not as a secondary storage drive. Configured correctly, your laptop may then be speedy enough so that no hardware upgrade would provide all that much benefit.

 

[JackMDS]

http://superuser.com/questions/4523...ssd-disk-used-configured-in-a-dell-xps-laptop

Or, and, https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/How-it-Works-Intel-SSD-Caching-148

There are few ways to go about it, once you understand what exatly you have there and to what type of system you want to upgrade it will be very easy to help.

"little mSATA SSD" is cute but it is not a viable technical term.

 

[Banana]

Thanks for the replies - I'm being led down a different road altogether! I opened the Intel RST app and the usage for the mSATA SSD was "Available." I changed it to "Spare" and after doing that, the E: drive no longer shows up. All I see now is the C: drive.

Here's what I see in iRST:
<image>
How do I know if acceleration is enabled? Does the absence of an Accelerate button in the iRST toolbar indicate that acceleration is active?

"little mSATA SSD" is cute but it is not a viable technical term.

It was effective in conveying my skill level.