SSD and HDD. RAID or AHCI?

vlassis94

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May 14, 2014
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Hello,

I just got a Crucial M500 480GB SSD and I want to use it in my computer for the OS (windows 7 64bit) and the programs (nothing special at all) and games (counter strike, left 4 dead, etc. also not something extreme).

I currently have a seagate 1tb (I think Barracuda), 8gb of ram, intel i7 4770 (3.4ghz) and a gigabyte motherboard H87-D3H (1150/H87/DDR3) and an AMD Radeon R7 200 Series.

I will, from now on, use the 1TB hard drive only to store movies, songs, pictures and documents. Any ideas of how I should proceed? Oh and also, in which format should I, well, format them (the SSD and the HDD)?

Thank you!




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Thank you for the fast replies. I don't know the differences between RAID AND AHCI and now is not a time for me to search them.. I do not mind re-writing windows, so I will re-install them once I set it up. Do I have to make 'adjustments' or some specific option to use the SSD? Or I treat it like my HDD?
 
I would use the ssd for booting and the hdd for storage. Uninstall the hdd and install the ssd in the port that the hdd was booting from and then boot into bios and set up it up, the memory and etc and make sure that it is set for AHCI mode. AHCI will give you better R/W speeds for the ssd. After windows is loaded and all MB drivers are loaded (get the latest versions on-line at the MB web site) install the hdd into another sata port and you should have access to it too.
 

CharlesLam

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Apr 15, 2014
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with only 2 drives there arent many raid options that you can set up with. just stick with AHCI. if you had 4 drives or more, then you might want to consider a raid 5/6 array, or two of the same size and speed for more performance with raid 1.

You can boot "partition wizard" from cd, copy the partition from your old hard drive to your new SSD. go into the bios and set the SSD to boot first, and then after windows has loaded format your old drive and repurpose it for storage.

http://www.partitionwizard.com/

good luck.