I've done some research recently on how to get the most out of an SSD (a Kingston HyperX 3K, 240 GB), but I've still got a few questions, and it would be nice to have the answers in one place when I get to installing the thing. Any help given would be most appreciated.

* I want to move the OS to the SSD, but lack an external hard drive where I can back up the data from my current hard drive. A friend of mine says I can just set the SSD as the boot device and install the OS on both devices, but since I'm running an OEM version of Vista, would that still work? Ideally, I want to format the hard drive at some point anyway. If not, is there some other way I can move the OS without losing my data?

* What should I keep in mind when installing the SSD? I'd rather not have to wipe everything on it because I failed to tweak certain settings during installation, and it would suck for it to die on me in two years because I forgot to turn off some obscure, write-heavy feature.

* Anything else I should keep in mind?

Thanks in advance!

My 2 cents :

You shouldn't *move* an os, that's heresy. You should be able to make a ghost of your system and put it on the ssd. But I would advise a new clean OS installation.
I would also advise to deactivate hybersys filing and auto defrag processes (ssd does not require defragmentation whatsoever)

In the end, a ssd is meant to be used like a typical hard drive minus the defragmentation and the shock sensivity .... but you can always have system shock on your ssd of course.

Edit : you may probably have some corporate software that allows to make a backup dvd of your oem OS, depends on the kind of oem you're talking about. If your rig is assembler issued, you should have tools at your disposal on their website to package your os setup one way or another.

Will be watching this as its something im contemplating myself please update with anything at all!
i dont know how much these will help but i was given these to look at and [url=http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/solid-state-drive-ssd-tweaks-for-windows-7/552.html]here. Maybe people can comment if there worth following, i dont want to be responsible for breaking anything :p

"Moving" was just shorthand for "putting the OS on the SSD and removing it from the HDD". I'll do whatever gives the optimal results.

I think I'll keep System Shock 2 on the hard drive; the loading times are negligible.

There are several tools for just doing a straight copy of you current hard drive on to your SSD. The problems lies in the size of your SSD and how much you are willing to pay to do the transfer.

It's much quicker and better to do a clean install.

But if you would rather to the straight copy, first make your partition on your current hard drive as small as possible. In Windows 7, you can go in the Control Panel under Administrative Tools and the Computer Management tool. You will want to resize your partition as small as you can get it. It saves time and most of the free utilities will not let you put a larger hard drive partition on the smaller SSD even if most of the partition is empty.
Windows 7 has a built in backup routine, but if you don't have spare hard drive, or enough DVD's you will have to look into some of the other freeware or get something like Norton Ghost that costs money.
I did this with my current laptop with the Windows 7 backup and had to fight with the partition size getting it down below my SSD size. Windows likes to put a lot of cache files towards the middle of the partition that makes it damn near impossible to resize.

edit: before resizing disable your hibernate feature, and after you make a backup you can disable restore to get it down just a little smaller. Clean the drive after all of this and I even defragmented the drive before putting it on my SSD. Remember do not defragment an SSD.

I built a new PC with a SSD and I reused my old 1TB hard drive (which already had windows installed) so that I could keep the data. I suggest you really find a way to transfer your files before installing your SSD. I ran into a lot of problems with transferring ownership of my old files to the new system. I got it mostly working, but there are still some files that I can't access because of ownership issues.

If it's a new PC it is always advisable to reinstall windows. That being said, I believe he is using the same PC that the hard drive is currently using and just wanting to swap the hard drive with a shiny new SSD. So, he shouldn't run into the headache of transferring ownership of files.

I installed windows 8 on the SSD even though windows xp was already installed in the other hard drive. Anyway, my understanding of OP's post is that he plans to install an OS on the new SSD and not format the old hard drive(which is what I did) so he might run into the same problems I had.

To clarify, I am only going to use the SSD for read-heavy applications, namely the OS and MMOs.

What I am planning to do when I get home is to disconnect the hard drive, install the OS on the SSD, set the SSD to the boot drive, and then plug in the hard drive again. I am using an OEM of Vista Home 64. I will thus run Vista on both drives.

A friend of mine recommended this, and tells me I can cutpaste most applications to the SSD without problems. I will format the hard drive later at some point because I suspect it to be a prudent course of action.

Comments?

I'm not sure if we have the same situation since the version of windows installed on my old hard drive was different from the one I installed on my SSD. In my case though, all of my old files were considered to be owned by someone else, so I had to look for a registry edit that allowed me to quickly take control of most of the files in my old hard drive. I still haven't been able to access everything though. Reinstalling Vista on your new hard drive shouldn't be a problem though, I hear OEM copies are linked to the Motherboard not the hard drive.

If you are doing it like that you probably will have a problem with the folder permissions. There's ways around it but it is a PITA. Best to copy everything from your User directory into a shared directory and then you will have no problems copying the files to your new SSD.
Yeah, you will have no problems with reinstalling Vista on another hard drive with an OEM disk

I hope your friend doesn't work in technical support!

Sounds like a nightmare, absolutely no need for keeping a second installation of Vista on the second hard disk and likely to be a source of problems.

Disconnect the existing drive and then install your OS on the SSD. Plug the second hard disk in to copy across DATA (saved games, My Documents folder, favourites etc), but NOT applications. Then once you're happy you've got everything you need copied across, wipe it and keep it as a secondary drive. Reinstall whatever you want reinstalled, don't copy applications across. The likelihood is that you'll end up missing a dll file here or a registry entry there, and you'll struggle to find out why things don't then work properly.

You shouldn't do that either, Windows in particularly can act weirdly when you do that. Linux and *BSD aren't as bad now that you can use UUID to identify the disk, but Windows has a tendency to get confused and not guarantee that it assigns the correct drive letters if you're not careful.

That is a very important step. Vista and 7 like copying some important files onto both drives. If you remove one of the drives after loading the OS you could have problems booting without doing a recovery.

I usually keep at least 2 partitions on my HDD. One for the OS and one for apps/data. I usually keep the My Documents folder also on the second. For windows 7/vista about 50-60GB should be enough, the rest I'd install on the second partition.