New Laptop, No OS, swapping HDD for SSD.

Hi,
I've got an incoming Sager 5165 (hopefully in the next 10days) and will not have an OS installed on it. I've been reading a lot on the forums about RAID and AHCI on the BIOS with regards to SSD. I plan on purchasing a Crucial M4 128GB SSD to swap out the HDD for it. The HDD will then go into the optical bay slot. Prior to doing a clean install of Windows onto the SSD, what should I do with regards to the BIOS? Is there a "how to" to make sure I do it to best get the optimal performance out of the drive?
Thanks!

 

Basically, you only have to config the BIOS to use AHCI (very important). You must use at least Windows 7. During the partinioning, it's strongly advised to leave approx. 10% unpartitioned for over-provisioning, so you can maximize performance during lifetime (also extends lifetime).

After that you have to tweak some little in Windows, like disable disk defragmenting, disable indexing, and so on. There are utilities that can do this on 1 click, like the Samsung SSD Magician that I got with my SSD. (Works with non Samsung brands as well).

Good luck!

 

Oh, partitioning... I was just going to put everything on a single partition. Is it beneficial to partition the drive for OS, progs, etc?
If so, the drive will be the 128GB version and I will be installing Win7 64bit, how much should I partition for that?
Seems like I might be behind the curve here...will do some reading to catch up.
Thanks

 

It's absolutely no problem having only one partition for everything (I do the same), the important thing is, when you do the install, create the partition yourself. It will offer a maximum of 119000 MB's (approx.), and you substract 10% from it (it will be approx 107000 MB), and make the primary partition this size. Note that it will force you to create (will do automatically) a 100 MB partition at the start, it's ok. So basically, you should have a 100 MB partition that the installer made automatically, a 107000 MB partition, this will be your "C" drive, and 12000 MB unpartitioned.

 

What adrianu is getting at is if you create a single partition that is say 115GB of the 128GB, you can never unwittingly fill up your drive. The extra space remains open and the drive uses that space when writing data (where entire pages may be moved around) to apply "wear leveling" to preserve the number of writes any given NAND Flash 4K page can receive. As you write more and more to the drive, you will never physically fill it entirely up as the unpartitioned space always remains available.

Now, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this if:
a) your SSD has a comfortable level of non-reported portion of space already provisioned for this purpose. For example, the C300 I use has is a 256GB drive, but only 238GB is partitionable. The rest is reserved for wear leveling purposes, and I can never use it, so no need for me to reserve extra space, as I think 18GB should be plenty for the drive to use.
b) you know exactly what is on your SSD drive, and how much space is used/free.

In any case, if you want to read what others are saying about SSD partitions, here is a decent thread - http://forum.notebookreview.com/solid-state-drives-ssds-flash-storage/630021-240g-ssd-partition.html

Note, I was typing this while adrianu posted his entry. Please keep that in mind while reading this post.