Hard drives
Hard drives
Usually your BIOS would already be set to boot from the DVDROM drive first anyway, when you put the disc in it will ask you to press a key to boot from CD/DVD. Under a normal situation you'd never have bootable media in it, so it'll just skip over it and boot the hard drive.
A normal boot order can look like:
1. USB devices
2. Network
3. CD/DVD
4. Hard Drive 1
5. Hard Drive 2
and so on.
All you will be doing in the boot order menu of the BIOS is swapping the hard drives round (usually with +/- keys).
Something else you'll need to remember to do once Windows is installed is to disable the scheduled defragmentation tool. SSDs don't need defragmenting as they basically have zero seek time, so there's no advantage - in fact doing so shortens their lifespan.
Ok that sounds fine then, I'll check the order in the BIOS just to make sure it's set up like that. Just noticed there's no cable supplied with the drive so I'm going to have to get one of those first anyway.
Thanks for the defrag reminder, had read that somewhere but completely forgotten about it.
I did what you are planning to a couple of months ago when I installed my SSD.
1. Before you attempt to use/boot from the SSD you will need to go into the BIOS and make sure AHCI is enabled or it won't work properly.
2. You need to make sure you only have the SSD plugged in when you do the windows installation onto it.
3. Once you have the SSD installed, make sure you select to boot from that drive before the old one in the boot list. And only after it's all installed can you plug the old drive back in.
4. Disable defragmenting, superfetch, hibernation and move the pagefile to the HDD (if you have a good amount of RAM)
5. When you plug the old drive back in, if you do Run>msconfig>Boot and then just delete the old hard drive from the boot list, it will leave all the files on the disc, but just delete the bits that make it bootable.
However I did what you plan on doing, and just formatted the old disc and then copied the old files back on.
The way mine is setup is...
Windows and high performance software/games are on the SSD
I created My Pictures, My Music etc. inside the HDD and then changed the folder locations within the user profile. So when I go to User>David>Music, although I'm clicking on the same folders, I'm actually viewing files from the HDD.
Any more questions feel free to ask
EDIT: Also, make sure you plug the SSD into the first SATA port on the motherboard, as some boards with multiple ports only have the highest speed access on one or two of the ports. e.g. mine has 3 SATA ports, 1 is SATA3 and the others are SATA2.
Dave - why not get a usb HDD caddy? You can pick them up for about a tenner.
el_bandido Dave - why not get a usb HDD caddy? You can pick them up for about a tenner.
el_bandido Dave - why not get a usb HDD caddy? You can pick them up for about a tenner.
Also @Parthiban, have you got the SSD yet or are you still shopping around?
Crucial M4 gets good reviews as being the most reliable but a bit slow (only 250MBs or so), but I went for an OCZ Vertex 3 which is blisteringly fast (500-550MBs) and since the new sandforce drivers came out they have had some very good reviews too.
Make sure you get at least 120GB though whatever you go for.
toxo eSATA/USB3 caddy would get around the USB speed...
My OCZ 120GB SSD has just died
toxo eSATA/USB3 caddy would get around the USB speed...
My OCZ 120GB SSD has just died
Yeah, it's hugely dependant on the sata controller that your esata port is attached to. They're usually not driven by the same controller as your main drives - for example in my PC the esata port on the motherboard is actually a sata USB interface connected via a USB bridge, so it's just as fast as USB... nice one HP.
toxo Yeah, it's hugely dependant on the sata controller that your esata port is attached to. They're usually not driven by the same controller as your main drives - for example in my PC the esata port on the motherboard is actually a sata USB interface connected via a USB bridge, so it's just as fast as USB... nice one HP.
toxo Yeah, it's hugely dependant on the sata controller that your esata port is attached to. They're usually not driven by the same controller as your main drives - for example in my PC the esata port on the motherboard is actually a sata USB interface connected via a USB bridge, so it's just as fast as USB... nice one HP.