M17x R3 SSD swap questions...

i was interested in swapping the stock hard drive to this:

http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-64-2-...JKWG/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1325053687&sr=8-3

just for faster boot up and stuff, and then use the hard drive that the laptop came with as the 2nd drive... how should i transfer all of my data? can i just make a recovery on an external hard drive? and then install the SSD and then use the recovery?

i basically just want all the windows files on the SSD and all my music, games etc to be on the 2nd drive. Thanks all!

 

I just got this SSD and it's fantastic, with windows 8 dev preview my laptop boots in under 10 seconds. Do a fresh install of windows and transfer the stuff you need onto and external, then format the original HDD and transfer back.

 

i didnt get any recovery stuff with my laptop... can i call microsoft and get a free recovery CD to install windows on the new drive?

 

It's Dell you have to call.
Did you order your laptop new?

 

You can download win 7 for free: http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...-7-download-links-just-like-vista-before.html

Just input the key of the bottom of your laptop.

Dell don't provide recovery CD's only a recovery partition in the form of Alien respawn.

If you are that bothered you could ring dell for recovery disks, most likely for a fee.

 

Get it from here with SP1 included:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...-digitalriver-windows-7-sp1-13-languages.html

Follow this guide for a fresh install:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...er-install-order-guide-alienware-systems.html

And this:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ook-feel-after-clean-install-windows-7-a.html

And FYI Dell does provide a drivers DVD and a DVD to install Windows 7 !

 

Back up your existing Windows 7 activation using ABR and restore that after your clean install. It's not absolutely necessary, but works great and requires no internet connection. The factory install is pre-activated and that's what you are backing up with ABR. (This was made for Vista, but it works perfectly with Windows 7 as well.)

ABR (Activation Backup and Restore) | directedge.us

The product key on your COA probably does not match your existing installation. That's not a problem and it's absolutely common. I only mention this because some folks discover that and think that something is wrong... it's not anything to be concerned about.

 

i got the laptop from bestbuy. I'd like it to be EXACTLY (or as close to) what it's like now as possible... with the alienware boot screen and everything... just like how it is out of the box except with the SSD

can i delete or copy to an external hard drive as much as possible, and then use alienware respawn on an external hard drive and "respawn" on the new SSD?

i tried calling alienware tech support, but the guy that was helping me put me on hold after i asked for recovery disks for almost 20 minutes, and i got sick of waiting and hung up. should i try them again?



MOD NOTE: Hello and welcome to NBR, since you are new to the forums please take a moment to review the forum rules and don't attempt to bypass the language filter. Thank you.

 

theres no way to have it like that?

 

There is but is time consuming and a PITA.

See here.....

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ook-feel-after-clean-install-windows-7-a.html

You can also use cloning software, but I don't recommend it. When using a 64gb SSD space is a premium and cloning will cause space to be wasted unless you know what you are doing.

I would install windows 7 on your own, then install the drivers, then do these SSD tweaks to save some space, then do restore Alienware look stuff, and then make a backup of that (windows 7 back up is good)' then you shouldn't need to do it again.

 

64gb is not much, would this SanDisk be better? or is the Crucial faster?

Amazon.com: SanDisk 120 GB Solid State Drive (SDSSDH-120G-G25): Electronics

 

The Sandisk uses Sata II where as the Crucial uses Sata III and walks all over it.

 

alright cool. i think im gonna go with the Crucial 128gb. wont be for a while thought until i have some extra cash, unless it goes on sale lol. thanks everyone for the advice!

 

What I did was to clone my old HDD onto my new SSD using Acronis True Image. You might have to pay for it (unless you are unscrupulous) but it has a facility for moving to a smaller drive, which was key for me because I was moving from a 160GB HDD to a 120GB SSD.

Something you might want to look at

 

well, even with what music and games and stuff i have on it now, my pc says im using 94.5/689gb. and i figure after i transfer all my music and stuff and uninstall the games (to be reinstalled later), itll be around 65-75gb used. Crucial.com says they come with a data transfer cable as well, so is it as easy as transfering to a usb drive?

 

My Crucial M4 drive came with a USB-Sata cable to attach the new drive to the system. It also came with a disc with cloning software that worked perfectly.

I had my original HD cloned and the SSD installed and booting from within an hour or so. If you don't mind the wasted space that is taken up by a factory install, the cloning software really works well. My new Crucial M4 gives me a 7.9 in WEI!

I also had a Kingston SSD that came with its own cloning software CD and it, too, worked perfectly the very first time I used it.

Also of note, in both instances, neither of my SSDs were the same size or larger than the stock HD I was cloning from. So as long as the used space was less than the empty space on my new drive, it worked out fine.

I also found out that, for my steam games, I was able download and install each one to the SSD, then use Steam's backup utility to copy the local files to my storage HDD. Then I deleted the local files from within steam and freed up the space on the SSD again. I was then able to restore each game from my storage HDD to my SSD as I wanted to play them...it took much less time than downloading and installing again.

 

Crucial M4 in my R3 as well... can't go wrong!!!

 

Crucial M4 128gb coming in on monday. i found my recovery disc that came with the laptop. so do i just put the SSD in the main slot, and the old HDD in the secondary drive slot, and then boot from the recovery disc? then once its all loaded, format the old HDD?

 

A recovery should only let you re-install on the original hard drive I think. If it is an installation disk, then you can do a fresh windows install, but if it is a recovery disk it probably won't work. What does the disk actually say?

You sound kinda overwhelmed, so if your SSD comes with the cloning software and USB hookup, I would do that. Keep you original HDD intact and unchanged until you get the SSD up and running as you want it, then you can format the old HDD.

Ideally you should do a fresh install, install drivers, etc. This is fairly easy, and it will teach you a ton about your computer in the process, but it is time consuming, especially if you have never done it before. This route is harder, but ultimately more rewarding. But the cloning method will work too.

We will help you out as best we can.

 

I got my eye on a Corsair Performance Pro. Unlike the Force series and the OCZ or HyperX drives, the PP uses the same Marvell Controller that is in the M4. Unlike the M4 though, it uses 34nm toggle nand. the 256GB one is rated up to 515/440Mb/s read/write! Plus it has better random and incompressible performance than any other SandForce drive and beats the M4 in some areas. Steep price though.

 

i am a bit overwhelmed lol. never swapped drives before, and i just dont wanna mess up. Ill just go with the fresh install following katalin_2003's instructions from page 1. i should be good. ill post any questions i may have. thanks all!

 

Don't worry, none of us was born tech savvy, we all had to start somewhere. I'm sure you'll do just fine if you're patient and know how to follow instructions.

Just let us know how it went and if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the appropriate thread. We'd be more than happy to assist.

 

I think I'm in the same boat as the OP. Basically I have a single stock 750 gb hard drive. I only have about 200 gb unused space left on it. So in total I've used almost half a gig with everything I have. But from the very beginning since receiving the laptop I have not been satisfied with the cold boot speed taking about a minute to show the windows 7 desktop and even then it takes another minute or so for windows to settle down fully (I actually think the stock HDD is a bit pants, other stock HDD users have reported similiar slow-ish boot speeds).

So I would maybe upgrade to have an SSD and also the stock HDD. What is very unpalatable though is having to re-install windows 7 from scratch for such a change to happen. So much stuff has been installed, so much effort getting it all as I want. The amount of googling to install patches (especially for some of the older games I have) has been extensive. Basically many, many man hours have gone into it.

I take images regulary (using windows 7 in built imaging) but an image taken now couldn't just be used on the new SSD & HDD setup could it? Especially as Windows 7 would show the SSD & HDD as 2 separate drives (my existing installation shows as one) & 550 gig worth used space doesn't fit into say a 256 gig SSD. This is the conumdrum, to somehow get my existing installation imaged and then onto the SSD / HDD setup. Everything on my current install points to the C: drive, on the new setup things would need to be pointing to 2 different drives. I guess Windows wouldn't see both drives as one letter. And if it did it could ruin the possible boot speed increase from having an SSD anyway.

I would re-install windows 7 and start from scratch if I could but my time is at a premium & I can't afford to dedicate entire evenings trying to get everything back to how it was. Well not without the wife giving me grief for spending more time with a machine than her!

Is there a way to do this or is it impossible? If not, I'll struggle on with the slow booting stock HDD.

Cheers,
Wayne

 

Hi scottyboy99, what you want to achieve is not impossible. Actually the opposite is true, it is very much possible. These are the things you will need. A ssd drive (which I assume you already have), an external hard drive and a good imaging software. All you have to do is take an image of your current hard drive, store the image on to an external drive and then replace the hard drive you have in your system with the ssd drive (you need to mate sure you install the ssd drive on the same position of the actual hard drive installed in your system).

After doing all that, you need to use the imaging software of your choice to install the image you saved on your external drive in to the newly installed ssd drive. Once done reboot and you are done.

If you want to use the original drive which you had in your system, as a storage drive, all you need to do is install that on the second slot in your system, go into your bios and set the ssd drive as the primary boot drive so that your system knows which drive you want to boot the operating system from (remember that the original hard drive you took out of your system still contains the imaged operating system). Once that's done, boot into windows and using the hard disk tools, format it. Once formatted you can use it as a storage drive (you do not need to worry about the drive letters such as C:/ or D:/ drives. If you follow my instructions, the system will take care of that for you.

That's all. Have fun

 

I'm looking for some good cloning software. I've heard good things about HDClone but I'm still unsure.

 

I always used Ghost. I could recommend that to you but I don't know how you would feel about it.

 

got the SSD yesterday and installed it with a fresh install. ended up just using the recovery disc which installed perfectly. all the drivers are working great! now just doing updates and reinstalling my old programs. the SSD is crazy fast!

couple of questions. how can i tell if AHCI is enabled for the SSD and also, i tried to do some tweaks to help the SSD by disabling some of the background read/write processes, and i tried to disable hybernate by going to cmd and typing "powercfg -h off" and it said that i didnt have permission? i am the only user and administrator, how can i not have permission?

 

Run the cmd as administrator by right clicking and "Run as Admin".

 

ok cool thanks. its always something simple lol. is there no way to change it so i dont have to ask for permissions to run my own computer? lol

 

The SSD Optimization Guide - The SSD Review

Number 1 shows how to check for achi mode. Other good stuff to do is disable page file (if you have at least 6gb of ram), but that is controversial. I've always done it and never had an issue.

 

i tried to change to AHCI, and BIOS says that the harddrive may no longer work or id have to reinstall windows... what is that about?

 

That's because your bios came with RAID as default. Windows was installed and "aligned" (not using the correct term here, just a metaphor) to the RAID structure and can only boot that way. This is why you cannot clone a drive installed in AHCI to a RAID configuration etc. You also cannot boot of a drive that has been using RAID, with AHCI. You either have to stick with it or change the operation, format and reinstall.

 

is AHCI worth all that work to switch to? and at startup, when it shows me both harddrives before the BIOS option, it says both harddrives are non-RAID discs

another problem im having is that downloading with FF will work for a while, and then ill suddenly get errors saying that the download failed because i dont have permission to change the contents of the destination folder. and its downloading to the desktop. i tried uninstalling and reinstalling firefox, and it downloads fine for a while, then stops working... any ideas?

 

Hm looks like your windows installation has some permission errors. Best reinstall. Tis what I'd do plus you get to then use AHCI. Raid doesn't support TRIM.

 

reinstalled and im still getting file permissions issues all over the place... why wont windows let me control my own computer? its ridiculous? i cant even delete the Windows.old file that was made

 

i formatted the SSD, set the BIOS to run in AHCI, and reinstalled windows from my recovery disc, and have been running fine for a few hours now... hopefully ill have no more permissions issues... its dumb that it happened in the first place. why would windows not give permissions to the only administrative user?

 

Dunno blame M$

 

So, after i switched to AHCI, formatted, and reinstalled. after shutting down for the night, i tried to boot up the next day in class and windows wouldnt load. it said disk read error because i pulled out an external harddrive when i shouldnt have, which i did not do. so i put my recovery disc back in, formatted it and reinstalled again that night. after installing all the drivers and updates again, after shutting down for 2 hours, windows wouldnt start again. same thing: disk read error. i plugged the SSD into my girlfriends computer with the sata to usb cable, and it read it just fine, plugged it back into mine, and disk read error again. i exchanged the M4 with amazon for another to see if maybe the hard drive was just crap out of the box... any other explanations for my dilemma?

 

Raid does support Trim. Both my SSD and HDD use the raid controller and the SSD has Trim.

Raid arrays do not (yet) - common misconception!

 

Sorry to spring this on you without warning, but Trim does not work on Raid volumes. There is a difference between Enabled and Functioning. As far as I know from the research I have done, any drive using RAID, array or not, will not be using TRIM.

 

If the SSD is in port 0 swap it to port 1 - port 0 has known SSD issues and disk read error is one of them.

 

Hello everyone, but Dell is aware of the problem of SATA3 ports?

 

so i installed in port 1 and have only had one issue with first installation: it said that windows couldnt create a partition on the harddrive. i googled that, and people said to remove the 2nd harddrive for windows installation, and it worked. it started up this morning just fine. since the SSD is in port 1, but is still labeled as the primary drive and the seagate is "logical", should i change the boot order? it seems like it lags a bit at the end of the Klipsch loading screen, is it checking the port 0 drive for boot first?

 

If you're using the SSD in Port 1 as your boot/OS drive, the BIOS boot order should have Second Harddrive listed first.

 

What do you think about the OCZ Octane?

 

Honestly I was a bit disappointed with the Octane series. I thought it would be like the Marvel controller in terms of reliability and incompressible performance with speeds like the SandForce controller SSDs. The results showed that it wasn't up to scratch with either controller. It is still in its infancy. But it can't compete with the M4 and will not match up to the Performance Pro.

I'm hopefully gonna find time to do a review of this new SSD. The speeds are great, better than my mate's M4 and faster than my old Wildfire in terms of real world usage. It is similar to the Plextor M3S. They've now released their M3 Pro drive which is even faster. I should have waited but I'm sure this drive will serve me very well.

I'm looking to get a larger storage drive though. Monster Digital are coming out with a 400GB ssd. If the price is right (which it won't being Monster LOL) then it hits the sweet spot for a secondary SSD. I hate the hum and vibrations from ordinary HDDs when using the laptop on my particular worksurface

 

Hi Guys..

What do you think of Kingston Hyper X 240Gb rated at Read/Write speed of 555/510 and Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240Gb rated at 560/520 as seen at some retail shop where I live... Appreciate it if anyone with spare bucks would give it a review...

Thanks.. - (thinking of others trying wihout taking risk)
Sry for OT...

 

See if this helps: Let me google that for you and Let me google that for you too.

 

Nice to that.. Feels like a schoolboy now and being taught by a pro... OK.. Thx again..

 

hey. havent had any issues since last install of windows, but i just noticed that i am unable to do a system rating...? the area is just blank... what should i do to fix that? the only things ive changed recently was update BIOS to A09 and rapid storage update (trying to fix the no rating thing)