Cloning platter drive to SSD - quick question

[Garby]

(Sorry if there was a more appropriate forum for this; I couldn't decide where to put this).

OK, so I just picked up a 160GB X25-M drive, as well as an i7 940 through the Intel employee discount program.

Now, the processor will be sitting unused for awhile until I can afford to pick up an X58 motherboard and the appropriate RAM, but I'd like to begin using the SSD immediately. My current C: drive partition is 146GB, (with 40GB free), and I just wanted to ask a couple of quick questions.

1) What will the SSD be sized at, once formatted for NTFS? I'm hoping to avoid having to do things like shrink the C partition, although I suppose if I have to, I have to.

2) Assuming the partitions line up nicely, what's the best way to clone my Windows 7 installation onto an SSD? I haven't done a drive clone in a really long time, (and the last time I did it, was with MaxBlast and Windows XP, which was a lot simpler).

Apologies if the questions are a bit simple, but this is territory I haven't dealt with in awhile, and also, I want to make sure there isn't some SSD-specific piece of the equation I'm missing.

 

[sub.mesa]

1) 160GB = 149GiB.

The Intel 160GB actually is 160GiB (172GB) though; but the difference between GiB and GB is reserved as spare space; the difference between 'fake' gigabytes (GB) and 'real' gigabytes (GiB). That's about 6,8%.

So even though the Intel SSD physically has 172GB/160GiB you can only see 160GB/149GiB of that space; the rest is reserved. You should reserve more space than the default, if you want to keep it fast over time. If you're interested in that, you can increase the spare area by creating a smaller partition than the full capacity.

Either way, i strongly recommend installing cleanly. If you don't you lose the SSD-specific optimizations, may run unaligned depending on how you clone the disk and you will have a much fuller SSD because it will contain a lot of stuff that you don't need.

So a fresh install is highly recommended. Personally, i would create a 130GiB or 140GiB partition with 149GiB visible space; leaving the rest unused as extra spare space.