Windows 7: SSD Upgrade

Hi all,


So i finally purchased myself an SSD, Corsair Force Series 80GB unit to replace my current failed raid setup (lost one HDD so im keeping the other as a data drive) so this will be a fresh install

Ive read up a bit and found lots of conflicting information
My question is any do/donts or tips before i start the install in particular to maintain performance over time (TRIM etc)

Windows 7 does a good job of doing what is necessary with a new drive.

I'd just jump in and install Windows. When finished, I would confirm that defragmentation is off and that alignment is correct. Windows should do both, but I would check after Windows is installed.

Maybe turn off hibernation and confirm System Restore configuration.

What conflicting info are you referring to??

What issues are you referring to? 7 will TRIM automatically and the scheduled defrag will be disabled. I've been using 7 on an SSD for 8 months with 0 problems. Install and enjoy!

Nothing to specific or relating to my specific drive just different comments about firmware updates and bios settings, although my main concern is degrading performance long term was just wondering if there is anything to be done at the outset that would help with this but it sounds as though TRIM will do this adequately

Some would tell you to move your browser cache to some other drive to avoid unnecessary writes to the SSD.

I'd look at any Corsair forum I could find to find out about firmware. If you have a new generation drive, it may have the most recent firmware anyway.

Intel provides a good set of tools for its SSDs, but I don't know if other manufacturers have something similar.

If you do a new installation with a Windows 7 installation disk, there is really very little you need to do. All I ever do is to disable the hiberfile to save some GBs. The command is powercfg -h off.

If you plan to transfer your current /7 installation, then things are a bit more complicated. For that case, I have written this little guide: SSD - Install and Transfer the Operating System

A few links (in addition to whs's) that may be of interest:

SSD Tweaks and Optimizations in Windows 7

SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation

SSD Alignment

Edit:

Looks like whs wrote the SSD alignment tut...nice job, Wolfgang!

Windows 7 format will align it properly. If you want to do your own format with diskpart, use offset=1024.

The above references should guide you well.

One thing to note, this is a sandforce based SSD. It compresses/decompresses the data as it is written/read. The transfer rates quoted by Corsair is based on the ATTO benchmark, which uses zero-filled,100% compressible, data. Real world files are not very compressible. If you run a benchmark like CrystalDiskmark, which uses random data and which is not compressible, the rates you see may be disappointing, especially for writes. However, this is nearer real-world than the ATTO or HDTUNE benchmarks which use zero-filled data.

Make sure your controller driver is using the Microsoft msahci.sys driver, which supports TRIM. TRIM is very important for maintaining the write performance of your drive. Some MB devices like the Marvel or Jmicron SATA chips may not support TRIM, and only later versions of the INTEL controller driver do.

You should not obsess and run benchmarks all of the time. It will decrease your write performance (especially with random data like crystalbenchmark).