Holy Crap!

[Tunnelcat]

My husband finally replaced his old Dell XP system since it's time is up. He decided to get a nice little small form factor HP workstation with Windows 7 Pro since he can still has connections to HP people. It also came with a solid state OS drive. Hot damn!!!!! The boot time is SHORT!!!!! 3 seconds to the login screen from the Starting Windows screen! Now I'm really jealous. My game system takes about 20 seconds to boot from the Starting Windows screen. I'm sold! If only it was so much work to reinstall EVERYTHING to change out my old mechanical drive and my 3 year old ASUS Rampage III motherboard didn't have that crappy Marvel controller. I guess I could use the Intel controller, but it still wouldn't come close to his new system in speed.

[Grendel]

Get a Samsung 840 Pro or EVO and use the Samsung Data Migration Software to clone your mechanical drive. I've done that at least on 5 different systems w/o problems. What Rampage board is that, Extreme or Formula ?

[Krom]

x2 on the disk clone, it'll work fine and only needs one reboot after its done.

Use the native Intel port, a SSD on 3 gbps will still absolutely murder a HDD on 6 gbps. Seriously, I can even prove it with a benchmark from my system. I have two SATA 6.0 gbps ports on my motherboard, the first one is occupied by the SSD which only supports 3.0 gbps, the second one is occupied by the 3 TB HDD which supports and is running at 6.0 gbps:
This is the SSD:


This is the HDD:


There is no contest here, the only thing this benchmark doesn't show is how long it took to run. On the SSD it took less than a minute, on the HDD it took over an hour.

[Tunnelcat]

Get a Samsung 840 Pro or EVO and use the Samsung Data Migration Software to clone your mechanical drive. I've done that at least on 5 different systems w/o problems. What Rampage board is that, Extreme or Formula ?

It's the Rampage III Gene motherboard. It's got that Marvell 9182 SATA chipset, which only uses one PCI-E lane for it's connection to a drive. I also read that there are some stability issues using a solid state drive with this controller. I think Krom suggested I use the Windows msahci driver at one time, so I was thinking of that. I'm not sure what to do with the Marvell Controller that's already installed however. Does it need to be uninstalled or disabled if I don't use it. Still need more info. on how to fix this. Also, when you clone the drive, can it be kept as the C: drive? Thanks for the link to clone the OS drive Grendel. I was looking for something like that, and that Samsung drive is sexy.

[Grendel]

I have deployed many Samsung 830 and 840 drives (> 20), never had a problem. Great drives, very fast and reliable. Whatever drive is booted from will be the C: drive. You can keep the mechanical disk as an additional drive, but it'll be > C:.

Looking at this and the manual from here, the R2G doesn't have any Marvell chip on it, so I'm assuming it's a R3G

The R3G (link1, link2) has a Marvell chip for two SATA3 ports, true -- just don't use them ;P Use one of the 6 SATA2 ports (gray) connected to the ICH10R. This will be still way faster than the regular drives on the Marvell chip. Just disable the damn thing in the BIOS. Even for your current setup there will be no speed difference using the ICH10R over the Marvell chip.

[Spidey]

Who Reboots often enough to make a difference?

[Tunnelcat]

I have deployed many Samsung 830 and 840 drives (> 20), never had a problem. Great drives, very fast and reliable. Whatever drive is booted from will be the C: drive. You can keep the mechanical disk as an additional drive, but it'll be > C:.

Looking at this and the manual from here, the R2G doesn't have any Marvell chip on it, so I'm assuming it's a R3G

The R3G (link1, link2) has a Marvell chip for two SATA3 ports, true -- just don't use them ;P Use one of the 6 SATA2 ports (gray) connected to the ICH10R. This will be still way faster than the regular drives on the Marvell chip. Just disable the damn thing in the BIOS. Even for your current setup there will be no speed difference using the ICH10R over the Marvell chip.

Ooops. It's the Rampage Gene III. I fixed it above.

So disable the Marvell Controller in the BIOS then and no more Marvell?

[Grendel]

Yes, if nothing is connected to it. Else move everything over to the other ports and make sure all is well, then disable the bloody thing.

[Tunnelcat]

Grendel, are you sure about the reliability of the Samsung line? I've been reading a few reviews and some people have had them die outright. Not something I want happening with an OS drive. I'm thinking of swap file usage being a potential issue with lots of read/write activity, although I do have 12 GB of system ram. Also, isn't there supposed to be a registry change to be made before installing the SSD?

[Krom]

Read reviews on hard drives, they die just as much. Actually I'm working on my sisters laptop this week because it has a 500 GB Hitachi drive that is failing.
Always have a good backup plan.

No registry changes needed before the SSD install, or there shouldn't be anyway. The Samsung software tool may change some settings to optimize the system for use on a SSD (things like disabling disk defrag on the SSD and changing some of the windows prefetch/caching behaviors).

As far as the page file goes, its pretty much harmless other than eating up a bunch of capacity. I have a paging file on my SSD and at most all it ever uses is ~200 MB which takes a week of idling to show up but otherwise gets basically zero activity. And the amount that ends up in the page file didn't really change even after I upgraded from 8 GB to 16 GB of RAM, so it is something that deliberately gets paged and not having a paging file might cause some compatibility issues. The only real change you should make is shrinking the page file to ~500 MB or 1 GB or something like that instead of the auto size which will be equal to the system RAM size (so 12 GB in your case).

[Foil]

I've done three spinner-to-SSD replacements over the last few months, zero problems here. The difference is just amazing.

[Grendel]

Grendel, are you sure about the reliability of the Samsung line? I've been reading a few reviews and some people have had them die outright. Not something I want happening with an OS drive.

Pretty sure. Of the > 20 I've used so far none failed (yet .) Of the ~12 Intel 320 I used a couple of years ago, all but one failed (that was a particular bad series tho.) If you don't mind the higher price, get a 840 Pro (faster & even more reliable) and, after installing, set over provisioning to the recommended value using the Samsung tool.

I'm thinking of swap file usage being a potential issue with lots of read/write activity, although I do have 12 GB of system ram. Also, isn't there supposed to be a registry change to be made before installing the SSD?

Just set the swap file size to "custom size", 200MB-2048MB. W/ 12GB of RAM it probably never goes over 200MB. And no, there's no reg-hack to be done before installing an SSD.

[Tunnelcat]

Read reviews on hard drives, they die just as much. Actually I'm working on my sisters laptop this week because it has a 500 GB Hitachi drive that is failing.
Always have a good backup plan.

No registry changes needed before the SSD install, or there shouldn't be anyway. The Samsung software tool may change some settings to optimize the system for use on a SSD (things like disabling disk defrag on the SSD and changing some of the windows prefetch/caching behaviors.

What about this?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

[Krom]

What about this?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

Your system should already be in AHCI mode even if you are using a mechanical hard drive. One way to see is to run that AS-SSD benchmark: http://alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads. ... nload_id=9 In the captures I posted earlier you can see some info on the top left, I'm using AHCI so you see "msahci - OK", just loading the program will tell you that info. As long as that line is green and says "OK" you are using AHCI and no changes will be needed.

[Tunnelcat]

I'll check in the BIOS, but I am going to switch to the Intel Ports to use the drive. I was also thinking of cloning the original drive as well.

Who Reboots often enough to make a difference?

Not only is boot time way faster, install times are way faster too. Very impressive. I've been blown away by those shortened times.

[Tunnelcat]

Your system should already be in AHCI mode even if you are using a mechanical hard drive.

OK, I looked. It's set to IDE. What a borked up setup. It appears that I must use the registry fix. Why'd ASUS even use the hobbled Marvell Controller anyway? It's worthless.

[Krom]

Apply the fix and switch to AHCI now while you are still on the hard drive, you could even move the HDD to the native controller while you are at it and get that part of the migration out of the way...

They used the marvell controller because it was the only thing that offered SATA 6 at the time.

[flip]

I've got a 250 gig Samsung drive that's been kicking along for at least 10 years now.

[Tunnelcat]

Apply the fix and switch to AHCI now while you are still on the hard drive, you could even move the HDD to the native controller while you are at it and get that part of the migration out of the way...

They used the marvell controller because it was the only thing that offered SATA 6 at the time.

After the fix, should I switch to AHCI in the BIOS first, boot into Windows, shut down, then move the drives to the Intel ports, or first move the drives, boot into the BIOS and make the change before booting into Windows? And after all that, then disable the Marvell Controller?

Also, my system was built with 2 drives, but not in RAID. One has the OS, the other has just my games. Would the original OS install have put something important on that second drive that might cause a probem with the cloning procedure?

[Krom]

After the fix, should I switch to AHCI in the BIOS first, boot into Windows, shut down, then move the drives to the Intel ports, or first move the drives, boot into the BIOS and make the change before booting into Windows? And after all that, then disable the Marvell Controller?

Also, my system was built with 2 drives, but not in RAID. One has the OS, the other has just my games. Would the original OS install have put something important on that second drive that might cause a probem with the cloning procedure?

The order isn't too particular other than the need to apply the fix first. So you can move the drives and then do the BIOS change, or do the BIOS change and then move the drives.

On your second question, it is unlikely the OS put anything important on the second drive, and even if it did put something important on the second drive you can repair them quickly with by booting from the windows 7 DVD and using its repair option. I had to do that once because the first time I installed Windows 7 it put the boot loader on D: because that drive was on SATA port 0 and C: was on SATA port 1, even though BIOS boot priority was set to port 1 first. A couple years later when I built a new system I had learned my lesson and disconnected all the other drives first before I installed windows on my SSD. As for it causing any complications in the clone, it won't, other than maybe you having to look a little more closely at the source and destination drives when you go to do it so you don't accidentally clone to/from the wrong drive. If you want to be extra cautious, disconnect the second drive before running the clone if you want.

[Tunnelcat]

Windows won't throw a fit if it doesn't see that second drive when I boot? And Krom, which would you do personally, clone the OS, or do a reinstall? If I were to do a reinstall of the OS, would it be prudent to uninstall my games from Origin and Ubisoft (except Steam, which I have backed up) and Office 2010 ( which I installed from a boxed 3 license version) so that the copy protection doesn't lock me out? Would it be wise to do a clear cmos on the motherboard too?

A different question. Once I migrate my OS to the SSD, I will have that extra 1TB drive and I'd like to use it for more game space. It will still have that old OS information on it however. What's the best way to clean it out using my rig? I don't have another computer to use just for reformatting the drive.

[Krom]

What I would do personally depends on the temperament of the system. If the OS has been running consistently perfect, I would just clone it because that is faster. If on the other hand the OS has had some annoying glitches, or has accumulated a few too many left over software drivers and the like that would take more time to flush out than just doing a fresh install, then I would do a fresh install. I'm somewhat different from most users though in how I organize my files and programs, so a fresh install is maybe a 90 minute process, actually even a little less if I still have the previous OS drive/volume available to grab files out of. And since I have a fairly powerful system on a SSD, even doing the 130+ post SP1 updates is over and done with in half an hour.

If you want to do a fresh install just for the opportunity of it, grab yourself a copy of Advanced Tokens Manager so you can backup and restore your Windows 7 & office activations. Also I'd recommend installing with the latest official media: http://www.heidoc.net/joomla/technology ... load-links (these are legit links, read the blog post for details). Just grab the relevant language SP1 iso image and burn it to a disk (so for Professional SP1 x64 English you would want "X17-59186.iso").

As for clearing cmos, unless you have royally screwed up something in your bios settings, don't do it.

On the games, you can probably run the revoke commands for securom or other copy protections without uninstalling them, but it shouldn't really be necessary as long as you haven't installed/reinstalled them more than 3-4 times in the last 6 months. If you don't want them on the SSD, just copy them off and delete the folders, most games don't care if they are moved to different drives/partitions. Steam also is pretty indifferent about moving from C: to D: or E:, you only need to copy the steam folder, uninstall it from C: and reinstall it to the copied folder on D: or E:, you won't even have to reinstall or update any of the games in the library.

Once you have the OS and everything on your SSD and want to clean the other drive off, easiest way is to delete the current partitions on it from disk management (Win+R = Run: diskmgmt.msc ) and then make a new simple volume using the entire 1 TB, (quick)format it NTFS, done.

[Tunnelcat]

Thanks Krom. My OS has been pretty stable as of late. The only driver changes have been with the GPU. Everything else is unchanged. I'm kind of from the school of "If it works or isn't causing issues, leave it alone", so I haven't done any other driver updates. I might just go ahead and clone the OS drive first without any other drives attached. I'll make sure I have all that handy software you've shown links for just in case things go south. Either way, I won't touch the cmos settings.

What happens when I unplug the game HDD and boot into Windows to do the cloning? Will Windows throw a fit?

[Krom]

Worst windows would do is pop up an annoying "... not found <ok>" error or two on the screen, and that is only if some application or service on the secondary drive is configured to start with windows (and even then, some methods via the registry won't generate visible errors). As long as you haven't put anything system critical on the secondary drive, windows will boot the same regardless of if the drive is there or not. (And windows won't put anything system critical on a different disk/volume unless you go out of your way to put it there yourself, so it is a pretty unlikely scenario. Even if you did, just plug it back in and reboot, problem solved.)

Basically it is really hard to get windows to spread stuff around enough that it *needs* a secondary hard drive to boot, because windows tries pretty hard to keep itself and everything important on C:. If you put auto-starting applications and services on the secondary drive, you can generate a lot of pop up errors and complaints, but windows will still start fine because everything it really *needs* should still be on C:.

[Tunnelcat]

Krom, Grendel or Foil, just curious, have you guys disabled Prefetching, Search Indexing and Restore Point creation on your SSD's? There was an article in Maximum PC about doing those things to cater to your SSD and make it work more efficiently.

[Krom]

Superfetch is disabled, either by the Intel SSD toolbox (or samsung magician, etc) or automatically by windows itself when it detects a SSD.

Only benefit to disabling search indexing is a reduction in writes to the SSD, non-issue on modern drives, leave it alone.

It is better to have system restore enabled and not need it, then to have it disabled and need it (and the default 5% of the drive capacity is pretty harmless).

[Duper]

hey, I just noticed that my page file is HUGE! like 16 gig. Is that really necessary??! (Win 7 Pro 64bit)

Oh, Also, I have a hybrid SSd/HDD. (Seagate ST750LX003-1AC154) but windows doesn't seem to see the SSD part. perhaps that's 100 meg system section? *shrug*

Glad to hear that things are leveling out for you TC!

[Krom]

The Seagate hybrid drives are a conventional hard drive with an 8 GB flash memory cache on them. They do better than a conventional hard drive alone, but can't beat a full on SSD. As for your page file, windows defaults it to being equal to you system RAM. So yeah, 16 GB is overkill at that point, you could shrink it to 1 GB or so just to save space if you want (for compatibility reasons you don't want to disable the page file entirely).

[Tunnelcat]

I've got my current HHD's switched over to AHCI Mode and I'm now using the Intel SATA Controller. I disabled that Marvell junkheap of a controller. Now to get an SSD. I'm looking at Samsung's line. Which would be better, the 840 Pro or the 840 EVO? There's a substantial price difference between the two for the same capacity.

[Krom]

Both are plenty fast. The Pro edges out the EVO at their worst case performance (something that cannot be done outside of artificial benchmarking or enterprise class workloads), but even for heavy use by a single user both should be about the same. The EVO might actually be a bit faster than the Pro at light-moderate workloads thanks to some crafty tricks samsung did with their flash.

The Pro does have greater endurance than the EVO but either one should still last decades as a single user OS drive as long as they aren't filled to capacity.

So basically I recommend the Pro for power users (who don't care about the cost) and the EVO for everyone else.

[Tunnelcat]

Thanks Krom. I'll only have the OS on the SSD, so being a gamer and having all my games stored on the old HHD's, I guess I'm not really a power user. The EVO might just fill the bill, and it's cheaper. I am thinking of putting X-Plane on the OS SSD however. They like to have the installation put on the desktop for some reason. Would that be OK for the SSD Krom?

[Krom]

Most games don't really benefit from being on a SSD, but it doesn't hurt either. It won't make the framerate any higher, but it can reduce level loading times or initial startup times, just like it would accelerate any other application starting up. No need to worry about writes or endurance with games either, they are usually extremely read heavy.

So basically, if the game has a long or annoying load time, definitely try it off the SSD instead. The longer and more annoying the load time, the greater the potential benefits from being on the SSD. Just keep in mind not all long load times are due to I/O bottlenecks so time them a couple times between reboots (avoids superfetch/memory caching) on both drives to be sure.

[Tunnelcat]

I'm only thinking of having the OS on the SSD. If I had more bucks, I'd replace the second game drive with an SSD as well. What's the best way to move the Steam Library from one drive to another? I was thinking of using one of the old HHD's for just my Steam games and the other one for the rest of my games that are not on Steam. My Steam Library is getting big.

[Krom]

It is possible to move steam games to different steam library folders, just not automatically. Set up a second library folder in steam on the drive you want via steam settings > downloads > steam library folders button, then copy (not move) the game to that folder, so for instance it would copy from C:\Program Files(x86)\Steam\steamapps\Common\* to D:\Steam\steamapps\Common\*, then uninstall the game (delete local content), then reinstall the game and select the D:\Steam library as the install location, steam will detect that the game files are already there, verify them and skip the download if everything checks out.