So for a few years I’ve been interested in creating a solid state (ssd) boot drive to get the benefit of a speedy restart, without the cost of a full ssd. I bought a 32 GB drive on sale for $60 a few years ago. I got it working as a normal drive, but there wasn’t much information available to get it setup as a boot drive without re-installing the OS. I decided instead to use it for a few programs that I regularly launch. Well now that prices are really starting to drop, I finally picked up an ssd drive which came with a great little migration tool to help transfer everything over. I cleaned up my 1 TB hard drive so I could fit everything onto the 500 GB ssd. I ran into the issue though that since I cloned a drive that was not an ssd, AHCI was not enabled. I ran the windows performance test and it increased my disk data transfer rate from a 5.9 to a solid 7.2 without AHCI. After running the Samsung Magician Software that came with my drive and optimizing it. I followed some instructions to setup AHCI which involves editing your registry. If you aren’t familiar with your registry proceed with caution as you can completely hose your system. I followed these steps to enable AHCI, then restarted the computer and modified the BIOS to use AHCI. It boosted the disk data transfer rate score to whopping 7.8. My write and read speeds for that ssd are 200+MB/s. They would be even better if I had a motherboard capable of handling the maximum performance of the drive at 500+MB/s, but alas I only have SATA 2.0.
A concise rundown of the steps to switch from a hard drive to a solid state drive without re-installing Windows 7 or having to tweak your settings:
- Hit the windows key and search for Performance Information and Tools.
- Click Re-run the assessment in the bottom right.
- Take note of your current Disk data transfer rate.
- Buy a ssd if you want it faster (assuming you don’t have one already).
- If required, buy a ssd drive holder and cable.
- If your ssd doesn’t come with a migration tool, find one such this software.
- Hook up your ssd and run the migration tool.
- Restart your computer
- Change your BIOS to boot from the ssd before the hard drive which you just cloned.
- Hit the windows key and search for Performance Information and Tools.
- Click Re-run the assessment in the bottom right.
- Take note of your new Disk data transfer rate.
- Follow these instructions to be able to enable AHCI.
- Restart your computer.
- Enter the BIOS and enable AHCI.
- Hit the windows key and search for Performance Information and Tools.
- Click Re-run the assessment in the bottom right.
- Take note of your new Disk data transfer rate.
This may look daunting, but half of these steps are just checking your Disk data transfer rate. What’s the fun of upgrading your system if you don’t know what it did? It was overall pretty straight forward. I did have one snag where one time I restarted the computer it didn’t output anything to the monitors. I restarted it again and everything was back to normal. Enjoy your blazing fast start times and fast application load times.