As mentioned in the 'New PC' thread I'm helping a friend buy a new PC tomorrow which will have an SSD drive. The PC doesn't come with a Windows - we'll have to buy that separately (from the same shop).
Now I suspect the shop will offer to setup the PC ie. install Windows. But if they don't, friend might ask me to, and even if they do, it would be nice to be able to ask a couple of questions just to check they know what they're talking about. I've installed Windows loads of times, but never onto an SSD.
However, I've done a bit of googling for Windows 7 SSD installation, and it all looks a bit complicated.
I'm sure some of you guys must have done this - was it easy? Any good cheat sheets?
|
I'd get the shop to do it, if you do it it will forever be your problem.
Its quite simple tho, Make sure only the SSD is connected, (disconnect all other drives) make sure the BIOS has it in AHCI mode, and if make sure you have Windows 7 SP1, you probably wont even have to have the drivers loaded on a flash drive,
|
The SSD drive will be seen just like any SATA attached storage and Windows 7 will install easily. You need to have the BIOS set up to recognise the drive in AHCI mode.
As this will be a new PC, it will probably come with a UEFI BIOS and so you can install Windows on a GPT partition instead of using the old style MBR. Might be better to still choose MBR.
Then if there's software that comes with the SSD install it. I can only talk about the SSD I have which is Samsung. There is an option to setup over provisioning which by default is 10% and this helps performance and lifespan... SSDs (and storage in mobiles and tablets) slows down when it gets full. There are also tweaks that can be done to Windows and the software does it for you like turning off prefetch/superfetch
Then there's some things you might want to do if you go for 16GB RAM. Either turn off hibernation (it will boot pretty quick of an SSD) or at least shrink the hibernation file. I think you mention this was coming with only a 128GB SSD. Windows on mine takes just over 25GB. Probably an idea to trim back the size of swap file on the SSD drive... but with 16GB RAM you're not really going to use it.
You'll want to store data and maybe some programs (especially games) on the hard drive though. Games can be quite large and the 128GB SSD will soon fill up.
|
|
If, like you mentioned in the "other" thread that your friend said he wanted to spend some money, now, before you start to do anything, is the time to get a bigger ssd! - as mentioned 128gb for games is small, (128 is small by most standards nowadays!) and he'll always be deleting and loading games onto it especially in a few months time. Save yourselves some heartache and invest in bigger, it is better! in the long run.
|
Thanks guys. Deal has been done, and yes, I realise 128GB isn't massive, but to be honest I think they're going to be more than happy with what they've got.
Shop is going to do all setup, but I will try to check that they have done it properly.
|
|
Make sure the games go on the hard drive. It will be a little slower to loads games but then no issue with space.
|
My S.I.L. is a computer whizz - his army trade is avionics - and his "other" computer is an Alienware laptop with two hard drives. One is SSD and on that he has loaded the OS (W7) and other main programs and on the other traditional drive are all his documents, films, photos etc.
The boot time is phenomenally quick as is program loading!
His main PC was built by him and apart for being VERY high spec. is water-cooled! For display he has an ASUS three monitor flat screen set-up something like this :- www.chillblast.com/24-Asus-VN247H-Super-Narrow-Bezel-1ms-Widescreen-LED-Monitor.html
Last edited by: Roger on Sat 24 Aug 13 at 19:49
|
You could have had some fun with this Focusless. As Zero and rtj have said it's pretty straight forward. I bought a 64GB cheapo Sandisk SSD as a something-to-do project to see what the fuss was about. Drive, caddy and leads cost me about 60€ last autumn.
I loaded Win7 Ultimate and a few security related programs onto it, leaving the original drive free for docs, photos etc... to be locked by OS. Not the most secure locking but better than nothing was my thinking.
SSD still has 26GB free today.
I'm not a gamer but the whole install from start to finish was totally painless. Boot time was more than halved from a standard mechanical drive. Standard drive has a transfer rate of 3Gb/sec, SSD drive can double that but suspect the motherboard has the final say in the transfer rate.
|
The motherboard in my desktop has an interesting idea - as do all Intel Z77 boards I think. Install a mini PCIe SSD (not as fast as a SATA 6Gbps SSD) on the motherboard itself and enable the Intel software. It then acts as a cache for the main hard drive. I think it would work well.
I didn't even venture down this route as my PC is also a Hackintosh so didn't want to have a mini SSD. So have one for Windows and another for the Mac side of it. And a separate/shared NTFS partition on a 2TB SATA drive.
|
I've seen some of the newer drives offer both, wasn't aware of the motherboards doing it too.
I'm running a five year old state of the Ark HP (Asus) Benicia board - Intel G33.
Last edited by: gmac on Sat 24 Aug 13 at 20:52
|
The Intel solution only works for an SSD inserted into the slot on the motherboard. It must take over the sixth SATA port I think but these mini SSD's are described as PCIe related. This motherboard I refer to is well over a year old so no new.
The same solution must be possible via any SSD with the right software. Using it as a fast cache. But if this is what you want, probably better to use a hard drive with flash memory cache on it instead. These drives were not around back then.
Better still... get an SSD as the main drive.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Sat 24 Aug 13 at 22:48
|
Windows 7 SSD installation - Zero
