I have a five yr. old 60 gb SSD boot drive and a 1TB spinner drive that has a partition for games, another for media, and another for archives. I bought an Intel 730 480gb SSD and it should be here soon. I was thinking of doing my old thing of installing Windows (in this case, 7) on a smallish partition and installing the games on another bigger one, on the SSD, and keeping the spinner for the media and archive stuff. Should I try to just migrate the Win 7 drive and the game partition? I'm not sure that matters that much any more, but it may be easier to migrate as each is already a separate volume. Or should I just reinstall everything, including a fresh Win 7 install? Acronis, the Intel Drive Migration Tool? Thoughts?
Nice purchase, I have that same drive in my main desktop. Honestly if your current Windows install is running fine then use the Intel data migration tool and be done with it. If you want that fresh Windows install feel then reinstall windows. Also why parititon the drive? Just make it one large partition the size of the drive.
Because I can retain the general relationship between Windows and my game installs, like this: OLD: C:-- Windows (& apps)(this is the 60gb SSD); ||| D: -- Games; E:-- Archive; I: -- Media (this is the 1TB spinner) NEW(?): C: -- Windows/apps; D-- Games ||| [ex-D] H:-- (empty for now*); E:-- Archive; I: -- Media (still the 1TB spinner) To the extent that the reg entries and .ini's and that stuff is retained, they will still point to D:\[game installation location], but maybe that's not all that big a deal anymore. *reserved for when Ali sends me the creme de la creme of his pr0n collection.
"To the extent that the reg entries and .ini's and that stuff is retained, they will still point to D:\[game installation location]" I'm talking about migrating the drives, not reinstalling everything. (Though I might; if I do I won't partition the new SSD drive)(the old spinner is already partitioned)
Crap, didn't even think of it. What about drivers? I used Acronis True Image to clone the old 60GB SSD to a new Win/apps partition, without much trouble. The fun came when I couldn't copy the games volume partition-to-partition. I decided to manually copy the files but TeraCopy wasn't up to it. I found a free program called Drive Image XML that let me copy my old game partition off the spinner to the new one on the SSD, but it was a raw bit-for-bit copy and this resulted in a partition exactly the same size as the old one, which was costing me 20GB of unallocated space. It also took nearly eight count 'em eight friggin' hours. At that point I'm flustered and thinking I'd have been better off just installing a fresh Windows and alllllll that other stuff. I finally did it with Acronis Drive Director, which let me copy the games partition but also allowed me to "stretch" out the new one to use all the unallocated space. Now that I know what I'm doing I might just try 10. Sigh . . . No rest for the weary tweaker.
Kind of off subject but what made you go with an intel ssd? Earlier this year when I researched ssd's samsung had the best product for the price(best performance) and it seems to still hold true at this moment in time. just being curious is all
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...cm_re=intel_480_gb_ssd-_-20-167-192-_-Product A lot of it was the price. I got it for $199. There was a similar Samsung drive at that price point at the time, but it was TLC, not MLC. And this was a 730 rather than a 530 series drive. http://versus.com/en/intel-730-series-240gb-vs-intel-530-series-240gb I'd be lying if I denied this was a little of an impulse buy. I have a tendency to hash and re-hash these relatively larger hw purchases to death. There was a sense the price wasn't going to stay down for long, and sure enough, they were out-of-stock and the price went back up within a day or so, so that hunch at least was correct.
The Intel 730 has power loss protection over the Samsung drive which is a quality I personally want in a drive. Also the 730 is a re-badge enterprise drive with proven reliability.
Wasn't aware of the first factoid, but glad to hear it. I'd read something about it being essentially an enterprise drive but couldn't recall where.
