Adding ssd

[jimbojambojunior]

Hi want to add ssd to my pavillion dv7 4020 sa. main reason to speed up and hopefully stop from over heating. I plan to buy a caddy and then buy a 128GB Crucial v4 SATA 3Gb/s 2.5-inch SSD@£62.39 with VAT. or a smaller model as money is tight. I dont want to have to delete everything of old drive but would prefer to use it as back up for storage and run ssd for browsing internet. i work on computer online so lots of cloud computing uploading downloading etc. basically i want to stop noise of hdd being cooled and have extra speed etc.

Question is can i just plug in ssd into 2nd drive and then formatt it and off i go or will I have to put ssd in 1st drive and hdd in 2nd and transfer loads of data if so I will get a pro to do. If I can just plug it in and get it to run main functions from 2nd drive im a happy man.

I dont want to have to pay some one else to do it as need to do it all for under a ton.

hOPE I HAVE GIVEN ENOUGH INFO
Regards James

 

[noidea_77]

Well, that's all a little bit confusing! By caddy you mean replacing the optical drive with the SSD? You can do that, but you will get no relevant speed from that. To get the speed and stop the noise you need to copy windows and programs over to the SDD and boot from it. There are clone programs like Ghost to do that, but it's not easy if the old HDD is bigger than the SDD. Buying the SDD from al local dealer for a few bugs more may make sense, if he helps you with a reasonable setup.

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

If you want to get advantages of SSD (eg Windows startup time reduced) you need to transfer your Windows and C: drive to the SSD and make it the boot disk.

If you have overheating problems that is a separate issue which should be seen to before proceeding.

maybe using compressed air to clean out dust from heatsink fan cooling system may help reduce fan speed and noise level .

Or putting laptop on stand with usb powered fan to increase cooling may help.

I have a 120 Gig OCZ SSD as my boot device for Windows XP + Windows 7 with user data on a separate Hard Disk
(previously I used a Western Digital 80GB 10,000 rpm hard disk and the SSD is many times faster to load Windows.)

Recommendation for Software to copy from one drive to another I leave to others.
(You want recent partitioning + cloning software which copes with Advanced Format sector size of 4K instead of 0.5K)

regards
Mike Barnes