Replacing laptop hard drive (SSD/HDD hybrid)

canuknz

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Dec 17, 2017
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Hello,

I'm in the process of trying to prolong the life of an old laptop and I was wondering if someone could help me with setting up Windows on a replacement (brand new) hard drive.

It's an ASUS C56CA laptop and it has a hybrid SSD/HDD or SSHD setup. I have removed the old Samsung drive and installed the new one (WD Black), but I haven't installed Windows 7 yet -- it's asking where I want to install it. It appears that the SSD part of the hybrid is a separate unit because it's still showing "disk 0 partition 1" and 22.4GB free, followed by "OEM (Reserved)" even after removing the Samsung. That isn't enough space, so I want to install Windows on my new unallocated disk 1 (WD), 1TB drive (on which I want to make a separate partition of around 200GB for Windows). My question is: why does the SSD say "reserved" ? Is it ok to install Windows on the new drive while leaving the SSD 22.4GB disk 0 as is? I'm assuming that this SSD/HDD hybrid functionality will work properly again once I've installed all of the drivers, etc.

Thank you very much for any help you can provide.
 
Solution
System Reserved is part of Windows and should be left alone.

You can't separate the SSD and HDD portions of a hybrid drive. The drive determines which files are accessed most frequently and caches versions of those files on the SSD portion for faster access.