Installing my first SSD With Questions

I have decided to install an Intel 330 series 180 Gig in my Sandy Bridge Pavilion Notebook with Win 7 Home 64bit and 8 Gig Ram and a i7-2720QM. From reading around and asking questions i have decided to do a clean install since it seems to be the best avenue by consensus of those here. I have a OEM disc that I intend to activate with ABRbeta. I do not know what if anything I should do in the bios or settings in windows to get this up to optimal performance. Is my system current enough to achieve the maximum read/write specs of a SATA3 SSD or should I expect something less and if so what should I be satisfied with and how would I check it? TRIM? What else am I forgetting? Appreciate the help!

 

Highly recommend you do a clean Windows 8 x64 PRO install instead for about $50 or less (if you're a student, etc.).

Win8 makes much better use of your hardware and will really give a boost to your new SSD.

As long as your BIOS is current and it's set to AHCI mode; I would not recommend any other tweaks (either with Win7 or Win8).

When installing: partition the SSD to less than full capacity if you want the most consistent and sustainable performance over the life of the system (at least 30% less - I run my 240/256GB SSD with up to 140GB 'unallocated' capacity to give the SSD the lowest WA factors and the highest performance while running GC routines. All of this also helps ensure that I get the most reliability possible too).

The one other thing to do: install the Intel SSD Toolbox and set it for 'weekly' automatic maintenance.

Good luck.

 

Thanks tiller fo rthe help. I have seen that I should partition the disk in another thread for less than the capacity. Could you explain a bit why I need to do this. My system and programs will fill about 90 Gig of the drive and that would only leave 40 Gig of free space if I leave 30% unallocated. aybe this means I need a larger drive? Is there some optimal amount of free space to target or some point of diminishing returns that one should consider. 140 out of 240 seems to be quite a lot considering the cost of these things. I am all for reliability and that is why I am leaning to the Intel SSD but I had not planned on not having access to that much of the capacity.

My work requires that I pay attention to reliability in my systems and I have become quite comfortable with Win7 in that regard. Win8 is available at very good prices as an upgrade though. Currently $40 for download. Cant hardly beat that for price anyway. I never liked to do the upgrade thing though. Do you know just what you get if you DL the upgrade from Softy? Is it a full blown copy of the OS that one could burn a bootable copy of for later reload of the OS? Or do I need to just buy the thing on disc to have that?

 

on a 256GB SSD I think you should leave 255GB unallocated

in this case that 1GB would be truly unstoppable, LOL.

 

Thanks for that miro. I do know that by the passing of 2 more years or sooner I will be replacing this notebook so if this undersizing is related to the longevity of the SSD then I dont think that I need to be overly agressive in this regard. Isnt there some of this built in by the disc makers anyway? The Intel 330 series has a 3 year warranty so I dont think I need to be so aggressive here again due to this also. Am I looking at this right or am I missing something? Any opinions on this would be appreciated.

 

I bet it does, intel actually started over-provisioning their drives when they first got into the SSD consumer market couple of years ago (X25-m comes to mind).

so dont worry at all, at least for the two years that you plan on using the laptop. Heck I dont worry about my T61 laptops, which I plan on leaving to my grand kids some day, heh.