[SOLVED] Older Laptop SSD Upgrade - Some purchase / install advise needed

[HaadwareHoser]

I'm going to upgrade a couple older laptops with SSD drives. The systems need more space, they're a bit slow, and it seems like the way to go to give them a major speed boost. Both spend way too much time reading / writing the HDD either swapping or loading, etc. But, they both have a lot of installed software and need to keep running for a while.

I did some reading in posts here as I've been away from anything hardware other than as a user for a long while. I could use some additional guidance and verification that I'm going the right way.

First, the Laptops: Both win7 machines, 1.9 ghz & 2.4 ghz. Running 250 and 300 mb drives that only have 30-40bgb left open. The systems are used for basic business software and some light graphics work. I'm thinking of 500mb or maybe 1TB drives.

From what I've seen, it looks like the Samsung 860 might be a good choice. The conversion software would be a big plus. We don't want to rebuild these - too much software, too many configuration details... conversion is definitely needed. I am techie sort, but life is busy and manufacturer's software that will do this simply would be a big plus right now. I do have an external USB/ SATA enclosure although these machines are both USB 2.0 so I assume it will be a longish conversion.

Questions:

• Is the Samsung SSD a good choice? Reliable?
• Is the Samsung software a good choice for conversion?
• I'm assuming the software does the boot sector and all? So it's plug-n-play to swap the drive after?
• Do the other SSD manufacturers have similar conversion software?
• Any considerations for 500mb vs. 1tb other than cost and the space I get?
• Anything I don't know that I should? (Everything I know about SSD is in the post .

Thanks.

 

[geofelt]

The recovery partition is small a hidden one.
I think if you look into disk management, you will find that the app also took care of creating and moving the recovery partition.
You could not have booted without it.

 

[USAFRet]

The recovery partition is small a hidden one.
I think if you look into disk management, you will find that the app also took care of creating and moving the recovery partition.
You could not have booted without it.

I could be wrong, but possibly the Factory Reset partition? Which might have been labeled D, and of 12-13-14GB in size?

 

[geofelt]

Usually on a laptop main drive, there will be a space reserved to enable a factory reset.
I think it is compressed and only accessible by the bios to reset the laptop.
Since the original HDD will be removed after conversion to a ssd, the recovery capability is still there if you reinsert the original HDD.

I just looked at my 500gb ssd drive.
I see a C primary partition with boot , page file, crash dump, and primary data 475gb
Then there are three partitions without a drive letter:
There is a recovery partition of 475mb. Strangely, there is also a second one. I don't have a clue about why two.
Lastly, there is a 100mb EFI system partition.
All of these are a result of using the samsung ssd app from a smaller previous drive.
My point of all this is that the app seems to take care of all you need to do.

 

[USAFRet]

Right.
I'm just curious as to what this other partition is.
One of those 3...they are essential, and a result of the migration, as it should be.

A Factory Reset thing, not so much.

 

[HaadwareHoser]

Phase 1 testing completed.... put the SSD drive in an identical machine and still got errors. So it's not a defect in the mobo / controller of the first one. I picked up an identical SSD drive and will be loading it tonight to see if it's the SSD drive or a compatibility issue.

 

[HaadwareHoser]

Thanks for the help so far. Anyone have any thoughts on the IDE controller errors? They are "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0." I typically get a dozen in the System Event Log at the Error level, all fired at the same time, ever 10-120 minutes when using the system.

I tried the drive in another identical machine and got the same errors. So, that likely eliminated a machine specific problem. I purchased an identical drive, cloned it, and got the same errors, so that likely eliminates an issue with the drive being defective.

At this point I'm left with a guess of compatibility problem. The machine in question is a Toshiba L355D-S7815. The IDE controllers show up as "standard..." in Device Manager so I assume it's just the default Windows 7 driver. There are ald "ATA Channel" listing... I think that's new with the SSD but not sure. They are listed as 0,0,1,1,2,3,4,5.

Would a drive from another manufacturer possibly run without errors? Or maybe SSD is just and issue for a machine this old?