Some question migrating to SSD.

[trep-]

Heyas,

I purchased an Intel 335 240GB drive which should arrived soon and I had a some questions before migrating. The goal of the SSD is to run with the following roles; OS/programs/games.

- The previous HDD setup for my OS/programs/games was a RAID1 with 2x500GB. I was planning on ghosting this on the SSD. Do you think I will run into problems doing so ?

- Any recommended free/OpenSource software to do the ghosting (no ISO if possible, I don't want to deal with RAID drivers etc.) ?

- I've read a bit about reliability and while the SSD won't be used for major I/O operations, I was wondering if there are small things that I should disable or some settings to look for (like making sure the scheduled defrag is turned off in Win7) to prevent data loss and increase the life of the drive.

- It will be running on a SATA2 port, any configuration I should be aware after connecting the drive ?

- Any maintenance should be done on the drive after like a year of using it ?

Nothing else comes into my mind besides that !

Best regards,

trep-

 

[mad-max79]

You can use Clonezilla for cloning. You should use AHCI but your RAID could couse some trouble.
Maybe you need to boot to safe mode and install normal AHCI drivers.
Turn of defrag, superfetch and indexing, should be sufficient.
Having a SATA II port limits maximum sequential rates to 250 MB/s but that's it.
I would check for a firmware update in first place, then doing everything else.

 

[Majestic One]

Great questions and Great answers. Thanks guys.

 

[trep-]

Thanks for the answers !

While doing a bit of research, I found this thing out;

http://download.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/intel_ssd_installation_guide_g17251.pdf

I might try the Data Migration Tool to copy everything over. Anyone has experience with it ?

 

[trep-]

I wanted to update the thread.

I used the Intel Data Migration software to clone the RAID1 to the SSD. I still wanted to keep my RAID1 to store things I don't want to lose, so I kept the disks into RAID setting in the BIOS and had no problem detecting the SSD (I have an ASUS P6T and i can either choose IDE/RAID/AHCI for the disks). Maybe it wasn't necessary, but after that, I changed the SATA cable between my SSD and the RAID1 to put it on SATA1 and made sure the boot order was set accordingly. It boot without any issues.

I turned off the defrag scheduler after that (right click any partition, tools, defrag). I also turned off SuperFetch (it's a Windows service, only need to stop it and disable it). I did the same thing with the Windows Search service.

Besides that, Intel offers some sort of health monitoring tool (Solid State Drive Toolbox). I used that to update the firmware. It also has some features like health monitoring and you can run diagnostics with it. I kept it installed.

trep-