SSD purchase and upgrade

Hello all,
I have an Asus n61 laptop, it has two HDDs. I was planning on upgrading my boot drive to a SSD. I already have one in mind, being the OCZ Vertex 2 2.5″ 60GB SATA II SSD. My problem is i want to clone my current C drive (40gbs of stuff) to my new SSD. I've looked around and seen some software that clones / replicates entire drives, but am hesitant on the reliability of them. Also i heard cloning an OS is not a good idea either. I would like to keep all my preferences and transfer them directly to the new SSD. Also im unclear on how to do so, i had thought of taking out my second HDD and inserting my SSD to transfer things over. Im not afraid of the hassle, but i am scared of losing my stuff. Or is making a fresh install of windows 7 a better idea. Any experience, expertise, tips would be very useful.

 

This has been discussed a billion times before. It's better off to do a clean install if you are only worried about a measly 40gb of data. Just do a new install, it'll take minutes, if that on a SSD. Everything will take probably one 15th of the time to install...

Simply write down all the other things, bookmarks and settings and such. Really it's not that hard to just do another install. That lets windows sort itself out. Doing a clone from a mechanical to flash RAM is never really a good idea.

 

Newer utilities like Acronis 11 will maintain alignment. Intel actually offers a free migration utility made by Acronis that copies from HDD to SSD and ensures proper alignment, but you need an Intel SSD. I used it and it worked flawlessly.

However, it is highly recommended to do a fresh install to maintain performance of your SSD.

 

People keep pulling you up on this, and I'm going to have to do it again: please don't give advice in such an authoritative tone when you have no idea what you're on about.

@ OP - my current recommendation for free disk imaging software is Macrium Reflect. Never had a problem with it. It will be fine imaging your C drive while Windows is running. There is absolutely no problem with cloning an operating system drive, that is the main use of disk imaging!

If your laptop has two hard drive bays that will make it even easier, as you won't need to buy a USB-SATA lead or anything. I'm unsure on how your hard drives are set up, but you should be able to pull the second (non-boot) drive, insert the SSD, run the imaging from within Windows, pull both drives out, put the SSD where the boot drive was and it will boot straight off it.

One note of caution is there are a few Windows/BIOS settings you may have to change to make best use of an SSD. I'm sure they're listed in a thread here somewhere so I won't bother trying to remember them off the top of my head. You will be fine making these changes after you've booted once off the SSD.

If you decide to go the fresh install route (this will be longer, but always better in general), you will be able to export all your Windows settings and just import them to the fresh install.

And of course, if you do a fresh install make sure you take a disk image straight away to guard against future problems!

 

possibility of misaligment aside, what is the advantage of 'fresh install', assuming it was a fresh install(i.e. no free vendor ware) in the first place ?

Reinstall all those applications takes time and effort.

edit:
and cloning a HDD to an SSD is perfectly fine, don't spread false information please.

 

It's admittedly much less of a problem with Vista/W7 than older versions - the reputation Windows has for filling itself up with crap, slowing down over time & requiring a fresh install every x months is largely outdated.

That said, depending on how long the OP's had their laptop, how much stuff they've installed/uninstalled (& what it was), and how diligent they are with basic maintenance, some performance improvements may be apparent - although they will for sure be very hard/impossible to notice on top of the huge speed increases from the ssd!

I think most of the recommendations for a clean install come from a sort of 'new disk = fresh start' mindset, which is understandable. Personally I always take a disk image and chuck it on my server when I first get a computer and finish installing my programs & setting it up, which obviously makes the fresh start thing pretty painless if I ever need to do it for any reason.

 

the longer I use my machine, the less likely I want to go through fresh install as over the years, things get optimized(not that of speed but how I want each application behave) which is very difficult to replicate.

 

I think we've got to differentiate cloning vs. imaging for the OP.

I recall posts late last year from people who did sector clones from their HDD to SSD and ran into big problems, though I cannot be, or give, specifics.

I'm under the impression that system images are much much better.