Show us your SSD performance

That is a good point. But I really don't know how many threads the Atto benchmark tool is running.

Yes, I tried it on my gen1 Intel which is the oldest and longest serving SSD I have. But I did not really notice any difference afterwards. But that is just my "feeling". I did not measure it before and after.

sygnus21 said:

Ok, after months of thinking about it and talking about it I finally pulled the plug and ordered an SSD drive - Amazon.com: OCZ Technology 120 GB Vertex 2 Series SATA II 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD2-2VTXE120G: Electronics. It'll be here tomorrow.

Can I just image my 120GB OS partition to it? Thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks

1. shrink your OS partition to a bit less than 120GB (in decimal)
2. Image the partition - if you have the 100GB active partition, you have to image that too
3. Install the SSD (or connect it via USB for a laptop)
4. Align and format the SSD with diskpart, see here: SSD Alignment
If you have the 100MB active partition, that goes for that. Then you have to shrink it to 100MB and create a partition in the freespace for the OS.
5. Move the images to the SSD.
6. Make the active boot partition on the HDD inactive
7. Change your BIOS to boot from the SSD
8. Reboot
9. Hopefully I did not forget anything - LOL

For the disk operations you best use the bootable CD of this program: BEST FREE Partition Manager Software for Windows supports all 32-bit & 64 bit Windows No-server OS.

Now if you want to make your life easy, spend $19.95 for this program: Paragon Migrate OS to SSD - Overview It does everything for you and you are done in 20 minutes. It is very easy to use - I tested it, worked perfectly.

If you are cloning from IDE mode and you want to switch to AHCI (which OCZ recommends) take a look at this tutorial.
If you want to go to the OCZ forums to see what they advise start here. Just a warning, info there is scattered all over the place and it is difficult to determine when they are talking about Gen 1 SSDs and GEN2.

essenbe said:

If you are cloning from IDE mode and you want to switch to AHCI (which OCZ recommends) take a look at this tutorial.
If you want to go to the OCZ forums to see what they advise start here. Just a warning, info there is scattered all over the place and it is difficult to determine when they are talking about Gen 1 SSDs and GEN2.

The people on the OCZ forum are mostly real experts. They will tweak for the last 0.1% of additional performance. For laymen like us that may not be the best approach. I have also seen them propose strange tweaks - e.g. turning Superfetch off which is completely counterproductive.

A lot of their approaches date from the early days of SSDs but are no more applicable today. Bottom line: use the OCZ forum with care.

1. the second quote is for a new installation from an installation disk - quite different to installing from an image. What you did highlight in red refers to the alignment.
2. I am not sure which of the steps in the first quote you do not understand. Essentially the cover the following.

- make sure the image is smaller than the SSD. Most free imaging programs cannot shrink the size.
- the 100MB active boot partition (if present) has to be dealt with
- the SSD needs to be aligned - else you can be up to 300% slower
- partitons have to be preallocated because thats what the recovery program will be looking for
- you need an active boot partition on the SSD for the Bios to know from where to boot - at the same time you need to deactivate the one on the HDD
- the BIOS has to be switched to the SSD, else it will not be looking for it as first disk boot device (usually one leaves the optical drive as #1 but that is ok as long as there is nothing to boot from in the optical drive)

Maybe this clears it up a bit. If you have further specific questions, don't hesitate to ask.