How to setup this new DELL?

I bought a Dell Vostro lappy for my wife. It comes with a 512GB HDD + 32GB mSATA SSD (I believe it's for caching)

I didn't open the box yet, I have a 512GB MX100 Crucial SSD

What is the best way to set this up? Simply clone the HDD to the SSD and leave the 32GB mSATA SSD or would that actually slow the laptop down as opposed to when using it while having everything installed on the SSD only without caching?

I believe if I want to install everything on the SSD I would have to format since it probably is setup in RAID mode at the moment right?

 

I would think so too... Probably doing a fresh install is the best way to go around the issue..

 

hey mate, unfortunately your reply came a bit late so I just tested swapping the SSD and keeping everything as is, which is using the mSATA 32GB as a cache disk then benchmarked with AS SSD and the scores were on par with what a Crucial MX100 should be like so I guess i'll leave it that way since it would be too much work to install the OS from scratch and then all the drivers and stuff.

thanks

 

Hey np.. Thanks for letting me know.. You always learn something from others experiences and I'm happy to learn..

 

you're right, I always heard on OC Forums / SSD Section that caching would actually slow you down since the mSATA small SSD is usually lower in performance than its bigger brothers and I would've never tried this to be honest if I weren't too lazy to do a clean install since it wasn't my own laptop but my wife's, just wanna give her something that works but with decent performance with none of my OCD habits of clean installing

Guess it wasn't a bad idea after all since the mSATA is only 32GB and I guess it mostly caches the boot files

 

I'd take any cache SSD if someone gave me one.. I can bare my computer starting up using a HDD.. Once you use an SSD, there is no going back