How to upgrade to SSD on M17x R3. Help needed.

Hi guys, owner of an M17x R3 here with a regular hard disk drive.

How do I go about replacing the current hard disk drive with a solid state one? What about the restore partition? Any help and recommendations much appreciated. Thank you.

 

You can use a 3rd party program like paragon or acronis to create an image of your system and store it in an external HDD, then once the SSD is installed use it to restore your OS onto it.

Or, you can do a Clean Windows 7 installation and load the updated drivers for M17x R3

Good luck! and prepare for some outstanding boot/load times

 

Or you can make an alienrespawn USB and just put the SSD in and boot from the USB. It will recreate the recovery partition and factory restore everything. That's what I did.

 

Yeah, will grab me one soon, any recommendations? I'm looking for 400GB upwards. Is it simply plug out the old conventional HDD and in with the SSD?

That's really good to know, and what I'll try. Thanks a lot for that!

 

Yes, you remove the old hdd (assuming it's not a raid0 setup with a 2nd hdd), and plug in the new ssd, and off you go installing the OS

 

I have read a lot about SSDs although I do not claim to be the ultimate expert. All the tutorials and guides that I researched prior to buying the Crucial M4 512GB that is in my m17x R3 said that drive alignment is a big problem for SSDs. You buy an expensive SSD for the absolute maximum performance and a misaligned partition is a perf killer in the SSD world. Therefore the recommendation is always to do a clean install. The second best solution is to do a Windows backup and restore that. The reason is that a Windows backup restoration is similar to a straight up installation in the way that it prepares the drive to recieve the restoration. The drive will therefore be aligned properly. I still do a clean install every time but I have no problems with a Windows restore.

Also, I wouldn't waste precious SSD space with a restore partition. I use a disk imaging tool (whichever is your favorite) to back up that partition to a file on a portable drive so I have it in case I ever need to put it back on there. I would never waste even two megabytes of space on my $600 SSD with something that I might ever possibly use once the entire time I own the computer. If it ever comes down to it, I boot to a USB flash drive containing the restore software for whatever image I saved to the external drive and restore it. Then boot to it on the SSD and do an actual restore. I would only do this in the case of returning it for service or selling it possibly. For daily driving, I want a nice clean install. That's not to say that the Alienware default image isn't clean... it is as clean of a factory setup as you will find anywhere in the industry. I just like knowing that I have a good clean install done the right way with proper alignment that isn't wasting any expensive space.

There are a lot of tweak guides out there too that are helpful once you have Windows up and running to maximize performance, minimize unnecessary thrashing of your new drive and shut down service that waste disk space. Turning off indexing is a must. You don't index an SSD. It's a waste of time and thrashes your drive for no reason. SSDs are so fast that indexing gains nothing. Restore points are also a huge space eater over time so I turn those off although I do give up a safety net by doing so. There are lots of tweaks. One final thing I always do is clear out the SoftwareDistribution folder within the Windows directory after the hundred plus updates have finished. If you install Windows 7 with Service Pack 1, you will get a round of 103 updates, about 40 more, and then one or two more passes with a dozen or less in each. Altogether that burns the better part of a gigabyte of space that is just wasted. There is a procedure for removing it correctly. Google C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution and you will find it. It's like three steps. Very easy.