SSD Upgrade--- How to do it properly?

I will be receiving my new lappy + ssd here soon (msi gt780r + corsair force3 120 ) I would like to know what I should do in order to proceed with the ssd swap.

The laptop comes with 2x500 gb 7200 rpm drives in raid 0, now obviously I need to change that.

Ill need to reinstall the OS in non raid on the SSD ( I have my own copy of ultimate) and reformat one of the 500 gb drives.

I am unsure of how I should proceed with some of the details.

With the smaller size of the SSD I need to limit data to OS/upgrades, Applications, and games. All other Data needs to go on the 500 gb drive.

When games save personal data they usually put in in a hidden folder app data in the user folder in windows 7. Are you able to instruct win7 to move all data from the user folder to another drive or does it have to be on c: ?

I would like to retain the recovery partition if possible.

Do the discs that come with PC's automatically create a partition for this and is it restricted to the drive you install your OS or will you be able to indicate what drive to put the recovery partition on?

Basically what I am asking is what steps to I need to make to insure I have as much space on my SSD as possible

Thanks!!

 

120gb is more than enough for win 7, apps and game saves. i have win 7 pro on a 55gb partition and i have all related apps on it (office, adobe, itunes, etc). i also just let the games save to the my doc folder. ill clear it out when some games make excessive autosaves (witcher 2). i still have 29.5gb of 53.6gb free. just install your games, keep pics, music and videos on the 500gb drive.

so you should be ok as far as space goes. first check the corsair force 3. there was a recall on the 120gb version. make sure you have a revised one before you use it. ive never had an msi so i dont know how it does the recovery partition.

Force 3 CSSD-F120GB3-BK recall - http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...torage/584426-corsair-force-3-ssd-recall.html

 

Im not 100% sure, but I think the SSD is restocked after the fix (from ncix.com)

I think if I can set the user folder to be on drive d: Id like to try that.

user folder contains the photo/video/music/download folders that contain most of the data.

Is there a way to set user folders on other drives ?

 

right click on photo folders. click on add folder and choose the folder in drive d: you want to save to. with the new folder selcted in the list click set as save location. do this for all the other folders.

 

Although trvelbug showed you how to correctly move folders inside the users folder to another drive/partition - it is still a 'half' solution because some programs will continue to create their own folders inside the 'users' folder.

To move the users folder completely see:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...gramdata-folder-separate-drive-partition.html


Highly recommended.