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Executioner · Post by **Executioner** » Sat May 26, 2012 12:48 am

I've been thinking about getting a SSD drive for a boot drive only. Probably a 128 gig drive would be fine. How do these install with windows? Are they treated as a SCSI device or SATA? What brands would you recommend?

Shadow250 · Post by **Shadow250** » Sat May 26, 2012 7:27 am

ive been running an ocz solid 3 120 gb with no trouble for almost 1 year now. for win7 you just install it no fuss no muss. with xp it has to be aligned first. it boots in about 45 secs including a kinda long bios bit. it will run in sata ide or ahci modes i run mine in ahci on a marvell sata 6gb/sec gets about 400mb sec which from what i read is the top end for the hdd controller. there are probly much faster drives tham mine out now though.
hope this helps

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat May 26, 2012 8:55 am

128Gb is more than enough, especially if it's only a boot drive. I'm actually using an 80Gb SSD on my workstation. I relocated my personal folders (Documents, Pictures, etc) to a 1Tb secondary spinning drive.

As far as Windows Device Manager is concerned, it shows up the same as a spinning SATA drive except that Win7 is aware that it's an SSD and as such it will disable scheduled defrags for that drive (you NEVER want to defrag an SSD).

As Shadow said (assuming a clean OS install and a blank drive) Win7 "knows" it's an SSD when it partitions it and automatically "aligns" the partition(s). If you're doing a fresh WinXP install then you have to align the partition(s) yourself manually, and I discuss how I did it on my workbench PC here, although if you Google around you might find a better procedure: http://pcabusers.org/forums/showthread. ... hlight=ssd

Now, if you're wanting to clone an existing OS install then you need to align the partition first before restoring the image, and I explain how I did that on my Win7 workstation here: http://pcabusers.org/forums/showthread. ... hlight=ssd

You can even do an alignment after the fact. It's the discussed here: http://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-sure ... erformance

You don't HAVE to align the partitions, but if you don't you won't get max performance out of the SSD.

Executioner · Post by **Executioner** » Sat May 26, 2012 12:48 pm

Thanks guys. I have XP on the rig currently, and its a replacement to my garage rig that is 12+ years old and getting slower by the day. The new rig is a dual CPU with a couple of SCSI 36g HD's running in raid 0. Looks like the best option is to install win7.

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