How to prep SSDs

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Visual360

n00b
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Sep 5, 2011
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This will be my first time using/installing SSD, and was wondering if there's anything I should be careful about, or is there any preparation to the drive that I need to do?

This is the drive I got, the Crucial 128 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT128M4SSD2, and I will installing a fresh copy of Win 7.

Do I need to change anything in the BIOS also?

Anyway, sorry for all the newb question(s), just want to make sure I get this one right.

Thanks.
 
Make sure it is in AHCI mode in the BIOS, but otherwise just install Windows as normal. After you finish the install, you can turn off hibernation and hybrid sleep to save some disk space (the hibernate file is the same size as your RAM), and you can set a smaller manual page file if you want, also to save space.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920730
 
You should also disable automatically scheduled defragmentation on that particular drive. It's unnecessary for SSDs (they don't slow down noticeably when fragmented) and the additional read/write cycles during the defrag procedure would shorten the already limited lifetime of the drive.
 
guney said:
You should also disable automatically scheduled defragmentation on that particular drive. It's unnecessary for SSDs (they don't slow down noticeably when fragmented) and the additional read/write cycles during the defrag procedure would shorten the already limited lifetime of the drive.
Click to expand...

If you install Win 7 on the drive, it'll automatically disable defrag for the SSD. The defrag service will still be running, so it can defrag spinning disks, but it won't run on the SSD.
 
Forceman said:
If you install Win 7 on the drive, it'll automatically disable defrag for the SSD. The defrag service will still be running, so it can defrag spinning disks, but it won't run on the SSD.
Click to expand...

Good point. However, it's worth remembering that Windows 7 won't be able to do that clever trick if you're using SSD drives in a RAID configuration and would most likely default to defrag enabled in that scenario. I'm pretty sure Windows 7 would have no insight as to the type of individual drives in a RAID volume (at least as long as it's not a Windows "software RAID" volume (i.e., a "spanned" volume) that is).
 
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