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So I had some problems recently from ramming my desk chair into my computer. I'm pretty sure I damaged both of the hard drives. I was able to get the OS installed on one of them and then was able to get it set up. But I've been getting BSODs and I'm pretty sure it's due to the hard drive being damaged.

Anyways. I went ahead and bought an SSD to put the operating system on (OCZ agility 3, like 80$ for a 60 gig hard drive.) Now, aside from trying to figure out if I should jury rig a way to mount it in hard drive bay, I'm wondering how to install the OS on it. Is it just like I would do on any hard drive?

For instance - I've read some stuff about how you need to be careful with page files and whatnot to keep it from writing too much to it, as that will wear it out too fast.

Also, is there anyway you can do a repair install and move the operating system to a new hard drive or do you need to do a full/fresh install? The reason I wonder is because I have to install Vista first then use a windows 7 upgrade, it's a pain in the ass.

You can use it as a regular hard drive. You don't really have to worry about it wearing out except under special server situations, or some hard core users that like to abuse their equipment.

You should be able to copy an existing installation over.

With SSDs you want to minimize the amount of data written to the drive. You can read all you want, no penalty for that. Try to keep it down to less than 5-10GB/day and you should get plenty of life out of it (barring actual early failure or firmware bugs).

Also you will want to reinstall from bare drive. Plenty of mounting kits out there to let you hang it in that bay.

--Patrick

ok so I have the OS installed on the SSD and I now have a regular hard drive installed for other stuff (not pornography I swear.) So I now have two questions:

1) In the BIOS there is a list of the different IDE channels (like channel 1 master = x channel 1 slave = y). For some reason the SSD is showing up as the channel 1 slave. Is this a problem? My guess is that it doesn't matter since it's all SATA.

2) From what I understand SSD drives operate better under AHCI due to NCQ. When I initialized the drive and installed windows on it I had forgotten to switch it to AHCI. Can I still switch it to AHCI without it messing stuff up or will I need to do a fresh install? On that same note, I have a standard platter HD in this computer also. If I switch it to AHCI will I have any problems with these platter drives?

To be specific. There are two BIOS options that involve this:

1)

SATA RAID/AHCI Mode (Intel ICH9R Southbridge). options are Disabled, AHCI, and RAID (currently it is "Disabled"). Disabled sets it in PATA mode.

2)

Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode (GIGABYTE SATA2 Chip. Options are IDE, AHCI, and RAID/IDE. Currently it is in IDE mode.

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So, what's the dealio?

1) It don't matter none, son.
2) You should be able to switch it without worrying about it. The reality, though, is that the windows driver doesn't care how the BIOS talks to the drive - it completely takes it over and as long as you have the right controller/chipset drive installed it uses AHCI if it can. So I doubt it would make a difference, but you should be able to switch it anyway without affecting the data or the OS.

right on.

Now I just have to figure out about the OS activation. I have an Vista64 ultimate OEM full install disk and a windows 7 upgrade disk. I just went ahead and istalled from the upgrade disk. Didn't seem to like either of my activation codes when I did it that way. I'll probably have to call microsoft and get them to approve it or some nonsense. whatever. I'm installing all my games first.

NCQ does nothing for SSDs, that's a platter-drive enhancement.
If possible, AHCI will give you better performance, but some chipsets have trouble with it. You'll know if you keep getting disk read/write errors even though the disks check out fine on a dedicated scan.

--Patrick