Considering upgrading your notebook's Hard Drive to an SSD (Solid State Disk)? Wondering if the cost is worth it, or if it is an easy proposition? Well the answer to both of those questions is a resounding Yes!
An SSD in a notebook computer has several advantages over a traditional spinning-platter HDD, one of the biggest is of course the speed boost. In my particular notebook that I just upgraded (a Sony Vaio VPCSE23FX/S) the speed difference is incredible. I measured the boot times both with the HDD and the SSD, and there is quite a difference. With the HDD, it took 55 seconds from the push of the power switch until the log-on screen appeared, then an additional 70 seconds until Windows was completely loaded to a useable desktop (the blue circle near the cursor disappeared). After the installation of the SSD, the boot time from pushing the power button to a useable desktop, including typing the password was reduced to 28 seconds total! Quite a difference.
Another benefit of having an SSD in a notebook is no moving parts, so it is much more shock-tolerant than a traditional HDD, and they consume less power, as stated in this OCZ SSD Guide. Upgrading to an SDD is exceptionally easy, below I will explain how I did it.
Before you begin, it's a good idea to make sure that all Windows updates are installed prior to beginning the cloning process. It's not unheard of that an update can cause unintended behavior on a Windows machine, and you don't want to have an error occur after the HDD swap, and not know if is an update that is causing the issue, or something wrong with the clone. Also be sure to empty the Recycle Bin, as you intended to delete those files anyway, and if you have to copy them over in the cloning process, it will just add time to the procedure.
The first thing you will want to do is create a system image onto an external HDD just in case something does go awry during the process; besides it's always a good idea to have a working backup of your system. You can use the tools built into Windows 7 or 8 to create a system image, or use the utility in EaseUS Todo Backup, to create the image, which is also the same software you are going to use to clone your existing HDD.
Once the image is created, connect your new SSD to a USB port on the notebook using a SATA to USB adapter, and then open up the EaseUS program. Select "Clone" from the available choices and follow the prompts to start the process. Be certain that you are cloning the internal HDD to the external SSD, and also be sure to check the box "Optimize for SSD". SSD's need to be "aligned" at 4KB for the most efficient operation, and even though your existing HDD may already be aligned at 4KB, it never hurts to be double-sure. The exact procedure including screenshots can be found here.
The cloning process can take anywhere from 1 to several hours depending on how much data you have on the source disk. So once you start the process, sit back and relax and let the software do it's job. When it is finished, you should have an exact, boot-able clone of your existing HDD, ready to be installed into the notebook. Simply remove the existing disk from the notebook and install the freshly cloned SSD and boot it up.
Now there are a couple of additional steps you should do depending on your situation. The first is make sure that none of the utilities you have installed on the system attempt to defragment the SSD. SSDs do not read data in the same way as an HDD, so defragmenting the SSD is not necessary, in fact it can reduce the lifespan of an SSD since the operation causes unnecessary read-write operations to occur. So any tune-up utility (common in AV Security Suites) should be modified so it does not attempt to defrag the drive. Also if you have the Windows Task Scheduler set to perform defrag, disable that task.
You also want to make sure that Windows is utilizing the TRIM command on your SSD. Unlike a traditional HDD, simply marking areas as useable for rewriting is not enough for an SSD. The blocks in an SSD must be empty of data before it can be written to again. As the drive fills it would need to rewrite blocks that have been used previously and contain data, so the drive would have to perform an erase and then a write operation to those blocks, causing the drive to operate slower. TRIM is a command that allows the OS to inform the SSD as to which blocks are no longer in use, and thus can be wiped. This wiping of the blocks occurs before any data would need to be written there again, helping to maintain the drive's speed. It is very easy to check if trim is enabled on the drive, simply open a Command Prompt with elevated (Administrator) privileges and issue the following command: "fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify" (without quotes) if the result is 0, then TRIM is enabled.
Also depending on your original system drive, you may have a recovery partition on it, and this can consume several gigabytes of useable space on your SSD. Since SSDs cost-per-GB is still higher than that of a traditional HDD, you probably have a smaller SSD capacity than you did on your HDD. Unless you have a notebook with 2 HDD bays and intend to use a second HDD for data storage, you want as much of the SSD capacity available as possible. To reclaim that space, create recovery media from your notebook vendors program, then you can delete the recovery partition and use the media to restore your system should you have the need to. To delete the recovery partition, I used EaseUS Partition Master, to delete the recovery partition and reclaim the space. This article explains exactly how to delete a partition and recover the space by adding it to an existing partition.
That's about it, the longest part of this whole operation was the time it took to clone the disk. I did have to delete my recovery partition, as it was consuming over 100GB of my new disk, and I wanted that space for my use. I did create the recovery media, and I also have the original HDD, should I ever have a SSD failure, I can put the original disk into the machine. I had no errors of any kind during the process, and now I have a very fast machine, that is more resistant to shock, which is perfect for the environment that laptops often find themselves in.
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