Quick SSD question . . .

J

Jellyfishpudding

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 12, 2006
Messages
249
I just installed two SSD's on my W7 rig. One is to be my boot drive and the other I plan to use solely for backup data storage. If I do a fresh install of W7, is there a way to add the data SSD without losing what's on it? Maybe just uncheck the 'quick format' option in the disc management wizard? Any other settings I should be concerned about when using an SSD like a removable drive?

Thanks!
 
When you install Windows, it should only want to format one drive. Just make sure you're installing to the correct drive and you ought to be ok. If you really want to be sure, unplug the SATA cable from the drive while you install Windows, then plug it in once you reach the desktop or after Windows is installed. (You can hot-plug most SATA drives these days). Either way, once it's connected (and you boot up if your PC is off), Windows should detect it as just another drive and you should be good to go.
 
unplug the SATA cable from the drive while you install Windows, then plug it in once you reach the desktop or after Windows is installed.
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Absolutely!

Too many things can go wrong if you have more than the OS drive connected while installing.
 
Spooony said:
Why not run them in raid and get a mechanical for backup storage?
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There will be a loss of TRIM, but getting a mechanical drive would seem to be more logical as a SSD is only necessary if video editing with 1080p+ rendering is being done.

As the others have said, just leave it disconnected from power and data cables until the new OS is installed on the OS SSD, then connect it and you should be good to go.
 
Ok, that worked. Now I have another issue. I installed W7 onto my 60GB SSD and it took up 43GB of space. Something's wrong.
 
Jellyfishpudding said:
Ok, that worked. Now I have another issue. I installed W7 onto my 60GB SSD and it took up 43GB of space. Something's wrong.
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Do you have a massive amount of RAM? Thus huge page and hibernation files? Or... are you reading free space as used space?:p

Old Hippie said:
Absolutely!

Too many things can go wrong if you have more than the OS drive connected while installing.
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My favorite was when I installed Windows onto my 1TB strorage drive instead of the 100GB partition on another drive. :eek:
 
^ I'm just looking at used vs free space. I know there are ways to reduce the footprint, but I wasn't expecting to begin with such a large amount.
 
43GB is NOT a normal size windows 7 install.. my SSD OS drive has 42gb used, and ive installed a lot of programs on it. the new service pack is pretty big tho.
 
If you are migrating from mechanical to SSD, you could just clone the data from the regular HDD to the SSD.

Then just boot into Windows and make sure TRIM and everything is working.
 
you can use Casper free trial edition to copy disk to disk. i did it twice last weekend.
 
plac said:
43GB is NOT a normal size windows 7 install.. my SSD OS drive has 42gb used, and ive installed a lot of programs on it. the new service pack is pretty big tho.
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I have a fresh Win7 x64 SP1 ultimate install on my HTPC. Only additional program it has is XBMC and firefox, and it's 19Gb.
 
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