Easiest Solution: Replace HDD with SSD like this in 20 min

Guys,

I had been researching and reading a lot of threads up here regarding how to easily replace HDD with SSD or to atleast put the OS on an SSD. Sometimes you get BSOD or AlienRespawn says that the SSD is too small. I got both ... so I tried another way which is not really particular to Alienware.

• I had my factory state M17x
• I installed Acronis (yea, I would be willing to buy something if it makes my life easier in an ongoing fashion)
• I "Clone Disk" my HDD drive (in port 0) into my new SSD drive (in port 1)
• Acronis will do this while rebooting your PC into DOS like mode and shutdown your PC after completition (on my pc it took about 15 min)
• I started my laptop again and on my first boot I went to BIOS (F2) and changed Boot order to Port 1 SSD
• I saved and rebooted my PC and HURRAH !!!!

I didn't change anything else nor did I do anything to bios before any of the above or RAID etc etc... nothing... As simple as above.... I am a very happy man today so I thought I should share this easy way with you guys as well.

I hope it helps.

 

I have been using acronis for years.
The best backup solution IMO
(I use the clone disk all the time, and make a "fresh New Install" backup with all my typical programs so that any time I feel the need to start fresh, I just reload my OS from that and in 15-20min I am all done)

D.

 

This is a bad idea due to Windows not having proper drive alignment when being imaged from an HDD to an SSD; the alignment is set for an HDD, you need to fresh install Windows onto an SSD to give it proper alignment.

Not sure if Acronis changes the alignment, but I doubt it. There's guides on the web for achieving SSD-oriented alignment. It's not a big deal but you'll suffer a 10-15% performance loss depending on the drive.

 

but if you do this windows doesent install TRIM....

 

Any good free solutions?

 

How to check if I have TRIM and all those SSD oriented functions available ?

For performance, I used HDTunePro to do benchmarks and are attached here with. Seems like I am getting what the vendor specs talk about. I used Vertex 2 from OCZ for this test & is giving me the same timings which OCZ has in the specs except the random access which they mention to be 0.1 ms and I got 0.2 ms

 

How to check If i have/have not all those SSD functions ?

 

winkey+r, type "cmd", on the prompt that will popup write " fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify" without quotes and hit enter. If the command return 0 then you have TRIM enabled, if it is 1 TRIM is disabled

 

I will suggest use this guide to tune your ssd The SSD Optimization Guide | The SSD Review.

It worked really awesome for me and I managed to gain back around 10GB..Also it increased my boot time to 22 seconds from 30 seconds (stock settings).