Over the past few months I’ve written a series of posts about the wonders of solid-state drives (SSDs). Short version: SSDs are blazing fast, they’re a bit tricky to set up, and their fast read speeds make them ideal in the role of Windows 7 system drive.

• How To Set Ssd As Boot Drive
• Install New Ssd

I now have four SSD-equipped systems—two desktops and two laptops—running full time. That’s given me an opportunity to try a very interesting experiment. How do you make an already fast SSD even faster? What I found is that the combination of an SSD and a disk controller upgrade can boost performance by a minimum of 50% and can triple disk throughput speeds.

So I'm a bit cofused about this. Do I just install windows 7 onto the 30gb SSD? Because doesn't a hard drive need windows on it to install programs? So I guess my question is do I need to install windows 7 onto my 1T hard drive as well? Or will it just make a folder for program files on the 1T when Install a program.

Since January, I’ve been testing a 256GB Samsung 470 Series SSD, supplied by Samsung as a review unit. (It’s packed up and ready to ship back now.) Over the past few weeks, I’ve also been testing a pair of Crucial C300 drives that I purchased as upgrades. The advantage these Crucial drives claim is that they support the SATA III bus, which is, at least in theory, twice as fast as a SATA II device.

The latest generation of PCs include onboard SATA III capabilities. For my two-year-old desktop PC I used an add-on SATA III controller (it also includes USB 3.0 support) that I paid $30 for roughly a year ago. (Sadly, it is no longer available at retail.) It connects to a PCI Express 4x slot, which also provides at least a theoretical performance boost.

So I now have this system set up with two conventional 7200 RPM hard disk drives on the SATA II (3Gb/sec) controller and two SSDs connected to the SATA III (6Gb/sec) controller. To measure performance, I put together two data sets and copied them multiple times between different drives. The first is a folder filled with 5,085 files in a wide variety of data types—pictures, music files, and documents—with a total size of 5.85GB. The other collection consists of three large disk image files in ISO format, with a total size of 3.4GB.

How To Set Ssd As Boot Drive

Here are the results. Each column represents average throughput speeds for a file-copy operation. Bigger bar = higher throughput = faster file copy. The column on the left in each group represents copies between two conventional hard disks. The two columns in the middle show mixed setups, with one SSD and one conventional disk drive. The two columns on the right represent copies from one SSD to another. In all cases, the overall result is determined by the read speed on the source drive and the write speed on the destination.

Yes, SSDs are faster. Simply introducing an SSD as the system drive and keeping the conventional drive for data storage will boost disk throughput by a minimum of 52%, based on these results. If you’re fortunate enough to have a system equipped with two fast SSDs on a SATA III controller, you will be able to copy files from point A to point B up to three times as fast as you would with two conventional SATA II drives.

I was interested to see that in one scenario a mix of an SSD and conventional hard disk drive outperformed a pair of SSDs. That experience suggests that write speeds are the weak spot of SSD performance, and that the combination of an SSD as a system drive with a fast hard disk drive for storage offers winning performance at a sane price.

So, between the Samsung and Crucial drives, which do I prefer?

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When I looked at the performance, price, and upgradability, it's impossible not to like the Crucial C300 drives.

The crude Windows Experience Index gives the Samsung 470 Series an excellent 7.3, but the Crucial drives hit the top of the Windows 7 scale with a 7.9. Here's what the WEI for this system looks like.

Using the detailed performance data available from the Windows System Assessment Tool, I found these differences in measurements taken in the first week after setup:

Samsung 470 Series	Crucial C300
Sequential Read (MB/s)	219.4	352.0
Random Read (MB/s)	130.2	228.7

Those are pretty dramatic differences. In practical use, both systems felt exceptionally fast and responsive. It wasn’t until I added big file-copying operations into the mix that the difference in speed became apparent.

The Crucial drives also had one other significant advantage over the Samsung design. Both companies released updates to the drive firmware during my tests, giving me an opportunity to test the upgrade process. Samsung required me to create my own bootable USB flash drive, copy an updater and a new firmware package to that drive, and then run the update by booting from the flash drive. The update was destructive as well, just as it had been with the two OEM Samsung drives in my Dell notebooks. I had to do a full backup before the upgrade and then restore from that image afterwards.

By contrast, Crucial delivered its update package in an ISO image file that took seconds to download. I used the built-in Windows Isoburn utility to burn that image to a bootable CD, which walked me through the upgrade automatically. And best of all, the upgrades (two upgrades for each drive, to go from firmware version 2 to 6 and then from 6 to 7) were nondestructive. After I ran the upgrader, I restarted the PC and both my system and data drives were intact.

I found the 256GB Samsung drive available online at a variety of outlets for $449, or a cost per GB of about $1.75. The best price I could find on a Crucial drive of similar size was about the same. Ironically, I found the smaller 64GB and 128GB versions of the Crucial C300 drives at Newegg and Amazon, respectively, for significantly lower costs—at $99 and $199, respectively, they cost only $1.55 per GB. (Both prices have since gone up.) So my main system here has a 64GB SSD as a system drive and a 128GB SSD as a data drive. [This paragraph has been updated to revise pricing information.]

And with that setup, I am officially spoiled. Sitting down in front of a PC that uses a conventional hard disk drive is almost painful.

All of those measurements were done on a system where Windows 7 was installed fairly recently. But can they sustain that level of performance over time? And do they really have high failure rates? That’s the subject of my next installment.

Previous installments in this series:

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Create a Bootable Clone of your Windows 10 Drive that can easily be restored and accessed anywhere which will provide great portability to your data stored in that drive. Follow the tutorial below to proceed.

Cloning a hard drive permits you to duplicate every one of the information on a circle to another. It is generally utilized among desktop PC and Laptop clients, when they need to redesign old little hard plate to another bigger one or Solid State Drive (SSD) or make a circle reinforcement to maintain a strategic distance from information misfortune brought about by infection, equipment disappointment or different reasons. A bootable clone is precise that can be utilized as a PC startup plate. Cloning is an imperative piece of your reinforcement arrange and is likewise valuable when you need to redesign your applications, framework programming or hard drive limit.

Also Read: Best Windows 10 Tips, Tricks and Hacks 2019

Contents:

• 1 How to Create a Bootable Clone of your Windows 10 Drive

How to Create a Bootable Clone of your Windows 10 Drive

The method is quite simple and easy and you just need to follow some of the simple steps that we had discussed just right below.

Also Read: How to Use the Virtual Touchpad in Windows 10

Make Clonezilla Live Disk:

1. Download Clonezilla. Get the form called “stable” with a series of numbers after it.

2. In the following screen, change the record sort from “.zip” to “.iso.” Unless you know you require a 32-bit form of the product, you can leave CPU engineering as “amd64.” Leave the vault set to “auto.” Then, click “Download.”

3. Embed a clear CD or DVD into your plate drive.

4. Explore to the downloaded ISO document in Windows Explorer. Right-tap on the document and pick “Smolder circle picture” from the setting menu.

5. Affirm the right plate drive is chosen, and snap “Burn” to blaze a bootable form of the ISO to circle.

Boot into Clonezilla Live

1. Ensure both your source and goal hard disks are associated with your PC.

2. Reboot your PC.

3. After you hear the single beep to show that POST was finished effectively, you will see your BIOS sprinkle screen. Now, press either the F12 or DEL key (contingent upon your BIOS) to pick a boot circle. In case you’re not certain what to press, search for an on-screen choice that says something like “Boot Menu.”

4. Select your DVD drive from the resulting menu.

Initialize Clonezilla Live

1. Once Clonezilla Live begins, you’ll see a sprinkle screen. Leave the default and press “Enter” on your console.

2. You’ll see some white content pass by showing that Clonezilla is booting. At the point when it’s set, pick the fitting dialect.

3. Leave the default determination (“Don’t touch keymap”), and press Enter on your console to choose.

4. Some more white content will pass by. When you again observe a blue and dim screen, press Enter to pick “Start Clonezilla.”

Set Up Disk Cloning

Since we’ve instated everything, we’re prepared to clone our circles.

1. On the following screen utilize the down bolt on your console to choose “device-device.” This permits you to clone starting with one physical hard circle then onto the next physical hard plate.

2. Press the Enter key to pick “Beginner Mode” which is the default.

3. On the following screen leave the default determination of “disk_to_local_disk” and press Enter. This setting permits you to clone one physically-associated plate to another physically-associated circle. Alternate alternatives permit you to clone to organize associated plates or work with segments.

4. Select the source plate and press Enter.

5. Select the goal disk and press Enter. Once more, you may see all the more hard drives here.

6. Leave the default alternative to skip checking or repairing the source document framework and press Enter.

7. Press Enter again to really start the cloning procedure.

Run Cloning Process

1. Clonezilla will request that you affirm that you need to clone the plates, eradicating the goal circle all the while. Ensure everything looks amend before writing “y” and squeezing Enter.

2. Clonezilla truly needs you no doubt. Affirm your decisions once more, then sort “y” and press Enter.

3. You’ll see Clonezilla make the segment table in the goal circle.

4. Whenever invited, sort “y” and press Enter to affirm that you need to clone the bootloader to the goal drive. The bootloader is the thing that permits the PC, to begin with, a circle; without the bootloader, the drive won’t be bootable.

5. At long last, the cloning procedure really starts! Watch out for the advance bars to perceive to what extent it will take.

6. Whenever done, Clonezilla will run some self-keeps an eye on the cloned drive. Press Enter to proceed when provoked.

7. In the following menu, press Enter to close down the machine.

Install New Ssd

8. Following a five-second commencement, Clonezilla will stop itself, and the machine ought to kill. On the off chance that your PC doesn’t close itself down, you can physically turn it off after you see the line that says [info] Will now end. You’re finished!

Also Read: Windows 10 Free Download Full Version 32 or 64 Bit 2019

So above discussion is all about How to Create a Bootable Clone of your Windows 10 Drive. After the cloning procedure is finished, restart your PC and select your recently closed circle as your boot drive. Hope you like this, do share wit