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Showing results for tags 'ssd'.
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I'm setting up a new computer that will have a 250 GB Samsung EVO 850 SSD and two 1 TB Seagate Barracuda hard drives. I want the SSD to be the boot drive and have the Windows folder with the operating system (Windows 7 Professional 64 bit). I also want to have a few programs on the SSD: browsers, email, and VLC Player. I prefer to have a lot of software programs. (That's just me. I have my reasons; don't waste your time trying to talk me out of it.) I don't want to overcrowd the SSD. I want to keep the great majority of programs and of the application data folders on one of the Seagate drives. I guess you could say I basically want a big Program Files folder on a Seagate drive and a mini-Program Files folder on the SSD. What's the proper way to proceed? Install the whole system drive package, with Program Files and user profiles/accounts as well as the actual OS (which I assume is synonymous with or subsumed in the Windows folder) on one of the HDDs, and then migrate just the Windows folder to the heretofore blank SSD and set the SSD as boot drive in the BIOS? Or should I install Windows 7 to the SSD and then create parallel Program Files and application data folders on the Seagate hard drive? Or maybe move Program Files to the Seagate if possible, and just have my small number of programs on the SSD in their own folders there? -
I've decided to take the plunge and try a SSD - which will be a new experience for me. I'll be installing a Win 7 OS to it and from what reading I've done it seems that the Win 7 installer can natively and automatically manage doing the "alignment" of the SDD correctly - good 'cause I'm not very techy. I've done some basic reading on this and then went to Amazon to see what was on offer. I decided that one of the following 3 SSDs looks like it might be for me (they are all around the 250GB mark in size): Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB 2.5 inch Solid State Drive Integral 240 GB V Series V2 Solid State Drive ADATA SU800 256GB 3D-NAND 200TB TBW Long-Endurance 560MB/s Read and 520MB/s Write High Speed 2.5 Inch SATA III Solid State Drive (ASU800SS-256GT-C) I'm wondering if anyone could comment on which of these drives looks like it would be the best purchase? My own guess would be that the Adata one looks best but I have never before heard of Adata - so wondering if they are a reliable manufacturer or not. Also, I am thinking of partitioning the SSD to split the OS partition off from other partitions which I would want to use for portable programs (quite a lot - most of the software I use now is portable editions) and data partitions. I've looked around and it seems opinion is divided on whether or not SSDs should or should not be partitioned. Any comments from experience on this would be appreciated. Lastly, if I do partition the SSD could someone comment on the following point. My understanding is that to reduce wear for any particular "cell" of an SSD that the SSD will write new data to a less used (or entirely unused) "cell" - in this way, over time, the overall "wear" on "cells" is spread out fairly evenly across the entire SSD. However, if I partition the SSD into multiple partitions does this mean that this cell wear can't be evened out as much as it could be if the entire SSD was just a single partition? I mean, if the SSD was a single partition then it has access to all cells on the SSD to even out wear. But, if the SSD is multiple partitions then does this mean that the SSD can only even out wear by only using the available cells within any given partition? Or does a multiple partition SSD still use all of the SSD to even out cell wear? By that I guess my thinking is that the partitioning of an SSD might be more "virtual" than real. On a HD the partitions are physically discrete parts of the HD. But on an SSD that might not be the case. On an SSD it might be possible to just say "partition" x is just a storage allocation size of, let's say, 50.00GB but that 50.00GB needn't be arranged as 50.00GB of "contiguous cell space" allocated to the "partition" - the cells that constitute that 50.00GB allocation size could (notionally) be anywhere in the matrix of the total number of cells available on the SSD. If that notion of mine is correct then that might mean that even if the SSD is "partitioned" into multiple "partitions" then the SSD still retains the capacity to even out wear by utilising all the available cells on the SSD. (I hope my meaning is making sense here.) If anyone knows which of these methods is used on SSDs for "partitions" and evening out wear I would be grateful for the information.
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Small SSDs are so cheap I thought one would be an interesting upgrade on my 'daily driver xp sp3 Dell 530s. Not so ... The machine is SATA so this should be plug/play ... right? Nope ... BIOS (up to date) detects the drive correctly. FDISK finds three partitions 1 & 3 are small, non-DOS. 2 is most of the drive, DOS. Reallocate to one primary DOS partition, FAT-32. (Like my real HDD for this machine.) Formats fine. Start to load XP from CD, it goes through the loading of files, etc. then crashes as soon as it touches the disk. "SESSION3" and a lot more stuff. The long code begins 0X20006F and the rest is 0X000000. The error message can be found with a web search but basically tells you what the text on the screen says "Something is wrong with your hardware. Take out any device you just installed and try again." Self explanatory but taking out my new drive isn't actually a solution to the problem of installing a new drive. More data to further confuse the picture. 1. I installed XP successfully using a Dell Dimension 2400. It runs FINE on that machine. I installed it on a total of five SSDs: Three were 2Gb ones -- too small for any more than a demo, but useful for that, I thought. The FIRST one of those actually came up fine on the 530s -- but I have mislaid that one. (Dummy ...) I also installed it on a couple of 16 Gb ssd's with the same (failure) result. All but one of the 16's were APACER, the odd one was SANYO, I believe. 2. For the fun of it I tried booting up one of the 2 Gb drives without doing anything to it: It came up, displayed an XP black screen, then went to a Windows Embedded logo, and finally to a hospital logon screen, which -- since I have no password -- was the end of the line. And probably wouldn't have gone anywhere interesting anyhow since it knew nothing of my keyboard or mouse. But what this says is that there's nothing inherently wrong with either the drives OR the Dell 530s. I have looked pretty broadly for more ideas, others who might have had this problem, etc., but no luck. Since the XP install causes an upchuck on the 530s I can do nothing more there. I can try to install the Dell 530 drivers on the SSD system running on the 2400: Often you can get away with that and at least the chipset and IDE ones might make a difference. Anyone got any more ideas? I've gotten more good advice on MSFN than all the rest together, so I thought it worth trying ... THANKS!
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Is anyone here using a Compact Flash card as a substitute for an IDE hard drive? Which CF cards make the best IDE SSDs? I'm planning to buy one at some point. I'll be looking at around 32GB capacity, and will probably be using Windows 2000 or XP. I've ran Vista and 7 on slow hard drives before, depending on the random read/write speeds of the CF cards, I may choose to run NT 6.x.
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Hello! One of my sisters gave me their old notebook computer for my 40th birthday. It's a HP Pavilion ZT1135. It has no working built-in networking capabilities and recently, the old hard Toshiba 40 GB IDE hard drive was replaced with a Transcend 8 GB 2.5" PATA SLC Industrial SSD (model number TS8GSSD25-S) as I was previously unable to use it for over a year. Looking into the information from Navratil System Info, the Transcend 8 GB 2.5" PATA SLC Industrial SSD has a actual fixed disk capacity of 7.45 GB. This drive is limited to 300,000 writes per single level cell memory (512-byte sector) for a total of drive life of writing up to 2.13 PB of data. Here's what I have installed so far: 1. I managed to install Microsoft MS-DOS 6.22 using the USB 2.0 compatible floppy disk as well as Windows 3.1 without problems and I disabled the Windows swapfile. By disabling the Windows swapfile, you CANNOT install Win32s. I managed to install 4DOS without too much of a problem, but I managed to disable swapfile support also. The notebook has 256 MB of memory with 248 MB is usable, 8 MB is reserved for video memory. The notebook PC has a integrated S3 Twister 86C380 graphics chip with 7 MB of video memory. MS-DOS 6.22 can only recognise up to 64 MB of memory and only supports the 16-bit FAT file system which limits the size of the partition to 2 GB (up to 65,505 clusters at 32 KB per cluster and 64 sectors per cluster). Currently, I have the drive split up into four partitions: 2. Drive C: (primary partition): 1,474.47 MB with 49.63 MB (or 3.37%) of disk space used 3. The extended partition occupies a total of 6,141.09 MB. Drives D, E and F all have 2,047.03 MB with drive F using 40.25 MB (or 1.96%) of disk space. Drives D and E have not been used yet. Overall, out of the total 7,615.56 MB capacity, MS-DOS 6.22 is using only 89.88 MB or just 1.18% of the total disk space. This may sound too much and too good to be true for a tiny 21-year old operating system. However, MS-DOS 5 through 6.22 alone may not understand how a SSD functions and I have concerns over possible data corruption. Also, is it possible to use USB support and PCMCIA drivers under MS-DOS and Windows 3.1? The notebook has two PCMCIA slots that were made by ENE Technology Inc. Under Windows 3.1, the OS doesn't even detect the USB floppy drive at all. Windows File Manager displays drives C, D, E, F and X. Do you have any idea what can be done to reduce data corruption under MS-DOS when run on a SSD? Also, how can I get Windows 3.1 to detect the USB floppy drive when MS-DOS does?
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Boot Win 7 Paritition copied to Empty space after Win XP on old HDD? I plan to upgrade my main OS from Win 7 SP1 x64 to 8 to 8.1. But to take the risk out of it... I copied my main Win 7 Partition from my SSD to Empty space on old HDD after Win XP partition. (at night.. so I dont have to wait around for 200+ GB going over) SSD 240 GB: [system Reserved: 200 MB] [sSD_P1 240GB] HDD 320GB: [Win XP 33GB] [sSD_P1 Copy 240GB ][Free Space][OEM Recovery partition] I copied this using Paragon HDM 12 Pro I did not copy the [system Reserved] partition as I wasnt sure how it would fit in.. and since its 200 MB, should be easier to "move" / "copy" if needed. Now, I read that there is a way to make Win 7 bootable without the SysRrv 200 MB partition. Or do I need to copy the 200 M partition? Is there a way to make the Win 7 boot while letting the rest of the MBR & booters (Win XP and OEM Recovery) continue working? What way should I follow? What steps should I take? PPS: Once this experiment is successful, I'd like to upgrade my SSD with Win 8.. But I am wondering if I should keep the 200 M partn around or merge it.. It just creates additional 'partition's to worry about. What are the pros & cons of that? -
OK, I'm just one week away of doing the real thing, so I'm going to review the process. It's the continuation of this thread but my last post was ignored, so I will start with a clean sheet now. I will use one SSD on MBR (UEFI on BIOS mode) with 2 partitions, XP on first, and 7 on second partition (that is, no 100Mb partition from 7). This is what I want: on XP: C: (SSD 1st partition) D: (2nd Drive) (for "Documents and Settings") on 7: C: (SSD 2nd Partition) D: (2nd Drive) (for "Documents and Settings") M: (SSD 1st Partition) I need 7 to watch XP partition for the SSD Trim, which XP can't do alone. Yet, I don't want it to override the default D: partition letter which will be used for Data on both OS, and both XP and 7 "Documents and Settings" folders. My questions are next, I pretend to use grub4dos as explained here, is that possible? I mean I will use UEFI in BIOS mode, and MBR type partitions. Also, what OS should I install first, maybe this question is linked to: what boot manager is recommended? (XP, 7, or 3rd party's). Then I also wonder what to do to avoid the 100mb partition Win7 creates. I have read that for that you better create partitions beforehand, that's fine. My question is, can I then format it to NTFS? My intention is to plug the SSD to my current XP, and partition and format to NTFS, the problem is that giving partitioning or formatting to a drive also "creates a proper boot sector on the drive", and that can cause issues. To make myself clear on a question I had on the previous thread I guess this guy had problems installing Win7 over MBR because he was on EFI mode (instead of BIOS compatibility mode), is that correct? This would be my grub4dos procedure, in the case of using 7's bootmanager: -make XP partition the root partition with:root (hd0,0)ls-check is the correct partition and make it active (as in C:), while hiding second partition (7's partition)makeactive (hd0,0)hide (hd0,1)-reboot, and install XP (7's "second" partition will now have a random letter and show as inactive), let it do the unattended, etc. reboot and load again grub4dos from CD to unhide 7 partition, make it active (default OS) by typing:unhide (hd0,1)makeactive (hd0,1)-Install Windows7, now Windows7 will install its boot sector on the XP partition (unhidden), so the 7's boot manager will recognize it and allow it to boot under the bootmanager. So in this case the Win7 boot manager will be used. Then you can go back to grub to set the XP partition active to make it the default OS.makeactive (hd0,0)The big problem here is the last step installing Windows7. I need the first (XP) partition (hd0,0) unhidden so 7 can install its boot sector on it, yet I want it hidden so in fact my Data drive which will be my default drive for "Document and Settings" is assigned the D: letter. I don't know how to make XP partition unhidden and at the same time not being D: (just a random late letter is ok).
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