For the better part of a year or so, I'd been planning on buying an SSD and installing it. On Tuesday I jumped on a one-day Rakuten special: $150 for a 256GB SanDisk Ultra+ SATA III SSD. That was $0.59 / GB, which is slightly lower than most every discount I had seen up to this point. Friday, it arrived, and I started the process late last night.
Equipment / software list:
- Backup external drive (for content on original drive that isn't going to go onto the SSD.
- Cloning software that can automatically realign partitions (see: EaseUS Todo Backup Free).
- Firmware updates for SSD from the manufacturer's website.
- Thumb drive for SSD firmware.
More or less, I just followed this Lifehacker post on it, with a few tweaks:
- Instead of backing up data and defragging the existing hard drive first, I actually slimmed down my existing drive by moving data that wasn't going to be stored on the SSD, onto the external drive. (By the way, you probably already know that you should limit the data stored on your SSD, because the more stuff on it, the less wear-leveling your SSD will be able to perform, and therefore your SSD will have a shorter lifespan.) Then I defragged the hard drive. The reason being, that there's going to be a lot of fragmentation after you move stuff off the hard drive. Of course, W7 automatically sets up weekly defrag sessions, so we're not talking a whole lot of jumbled sectors to begin with.
- I added a step of updating the SSD firmware, which necessitated either a CD or thumb drive (bootable). Why, after all, shouldn't one verify and update the firmware?
- Speaking of software, SanDisk happens to have an SSD utility to make updating firmware and checking the status of your SSD very easy, so I downloaded that, installed it, and ran it.
- When you insert a brand new drive, you almost always need to assign it a new volume / map it, using the Computer Management / Disk Management application in Windows. If the drive shows up in the BIOS listing but not in your Windows computer screen, it's because the drive hasn't been mapped. And, if you try to use the cloning software, it won't show up, either.
So anyway, it's hour 12 and I'm moving back my data to my hard drive. In-between I was watching episodes of House.
Some post-installation notes:
- Very important reminder: NEVER defrag an SSD. When you install an SSD, Windows will turn off the automatically scheduled weekly defragging. Each portion of data storage (a block) on the SSD can only be written-to, a limited number of times (though you can read it unlimited number of times). If you defrag, you'll rapidly wear down your SSD, causing it to become a read-only drive in a shorter period of time. Nice for a permanent archive, but otherwise useless.
- Also, turn off Superfetch and Prefetch. Again, when you install an SSD, Windows should automatically turn these off for the SSD, so you shouldn't have to worry about it, if you're using W7 or W8. Read the MSDN entry on this.
- I've also disabled file indexing on my SSD (right-click on the drive and go to properties). FWIW, you should read this and decide what you feel safe doing, to further optimize your SSD.
- As expected, a big boost in start up times. WEI shows 7.9 for the drive -- the highest rating. Oh, and my laptop came with AHCI already enabled -- something that is also critical, but probably already enabled if you have a newer computer.
- Having read many horror stories on the internet (including product reviews) of early (re: premature) failures of SSDs, I'm probably going to clone my SSD on an external (portable, not self-powered) drive. That way, if things go bad, it won't be too much of a hassle to get up and running again -- just change the BIOS to boot to external drive, then buy a new drive and clone the external drive. Again, having a laptop with two drives is a huge bonus.
- Finally, of course, I never before used hibernate; I use sleep mode. There are a few horror stories of BSOD / failure of SSDs from putting a computer to sleep / hibernate with an SSD as your boot drive. With the super-fast boot up speed of an SSD, sleep mode is almost moot. On my desktop I don't let my computer ever go to sleep, and the power button turns the computer off. With my laptop, I think the difference is about 5 seconds. I've switched the power settings so that instead of going to sleep, if I leave it alone, it'll just shut off the screen, but if I press the button or close the screen it'll turn off. I'll have to see if this'll work for me, but I think this will be my preference.
Whew.
Update: Here's the speed test scores. Note that they're not the fastest, but they more or less come close to the advertised speed for sequential read (530 MB/s) / write (445 MB/s).
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