SSD as primary HDD as storage

[pcorreiamd]

I am sorry if the next questions will sound dumb but I would consider myself dumber if I destroyed a laptop for being afraid to ask for help. I was reading the forum and I see that a lot of people are converting the SSD to the primary drive and making the HDD the secondary. Being an ignorant as the reason why I have a few questions that I could use some answers:

1. What is the advantage of doing this? And is it the same for the 1TB or the 750GB HDD?
2. Is there any guide of how to change the drives? I could sure use one 😛
3. Is there any guide of how to make a clean install and remove bloatware?

Thanks a lot and sorry for the probably idiotic questions 😉

[Holy]

1.fast boot times and what yo put on it feels snappier, yes its the same for the 1tb and 750gb
2.Look around there might be
3.Not sure sorry

[pcorreiamd]

Thanks Holy. It looks like you are always here 😛 They should pay you 😄

[Holy]

Lol nah i have nothing better to do while gaming lol.

Your welcome. i'll try and find links and i'll post them tomorrow if i find some.

[pcorreiamd]

Thanks a million. I will soon buy the G75 and I want be ready :P. Better to make all installations immediately than re-installing all games again.

[Cecil_2099]

1) Faster boot and load times on programs. Yes, it's the same for the 1TB and 750GB but the performance gain is more noticeable when upgrading from the 5400RPM drives than the 7200RPM drives.

2) John_from_ohio has a thread around here somewhere that outlines the steps he took to set up his rig. I personally did the following:
- I installed my Crucial M4 SSD to the open drive bay and powered on my computer. The system detected the SSD as a new drive and proceeded to install drivers. The new SSD wasn't formatted, so from Windows I formatted it. I then powered down the computer.
- I disconnected the built in drive (1TB) and moved the SSD to the slot the 1TB was previously in and powered up my computer and hit the ESC key to boot from the ASUS Recovery Discs I burned when I first unboxed the computer. You can reference my guide that I put together that's in my signature and in the Important and Useful sub-forum.
- Once my SSD was restored as the main, I connected the stock drive into the open drive bay and powered up and entered BIOS. I made sure to remove from the boot order the stock drive so there wasn't any boot conflicts. After saving the BIOS settings the stock drive shows up as a second hard drive.
- From windows I shrank the "OS" partition on the stock drive and created a new "DATA" partition. This way if there's a catastrophic failure on my SSD, I still have my stock drive ready to boot from (just need to change the boot order in BIOS).

3) Follow my guide for a clean factory install onto the SSD. You can uninstall whatever ASUS "bloatware" you deem fit for uninstallation once the process finishes (just don't by an OCZ SSD as apparently those drives have problems on a G75). I personally didn't uninstall anything on my system.

[john_from_ohio]

Thanks Cecil a good recap there.

Yes basically people put in an SSD because bootup/shutdown times become incredibly fast. Not only that but the system overall responsiveness also improves considerably. No lags at all on any kind of right click context menu mappings ... everything is right there all the time.

The basic choices for SSDs center around 1) how much storage do I need on my primary drive and 2) how much am I willing to spend.

Personally I wanted/need an SSD with more than 120 gb ... I want all my OS stuff and all my software installed locally ( Oracle database geek so there is a bunch of stuff ) plus about 35 gb of Itunes music all local. Could probably have fudged around with Itunes on 2nd drive but did not want to. I ended up with intel 520 180 gb drive and have a bunch of free space on it ( which I like ) and a 2nd 1 TB secondary drive ( not the factory drive ).

A Cecil noted when installing keep the original DRIVE pulled out of the machine ... they end up with identical boot signatures or something like that and it could get really ugly/messy. You can repartition the sizes of stuff on the SSD after getting all the way done with the recovery process ( follow Cecils writeup ).

I only uninstalled the Asus Live update program ( I think ) ... it seems to have some very bad experiences from people and you can periodically check updates on the asus support site that are available ( or well ... hang out here I guess from time to time ).

[dstrakele]

Here's a detailed guide for installing the OS to an SSD: http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds

[pcorreiamd]

Thank you Cecil_2099, John_from_Ohio and Dstrakele. It is just what I was looking for. And now any noob like me can do it easily. 😉

[Cecil_2099]

No problem! Now if you ever plan to use your HDD as a boot drive in the future (even as a back-up) just don't use EaseUS Partition Master to resize your OS partition to get more space for a DATA partition. I did that and now the HDD won't boot and the system restore process won't work to restore it :confused: