Thinkpads Forum

I have a T60 with a 100GB hdd, and I want to migrate the whole drive (including the IBM recovery partition) to the SSD.

I bought a used Intel 160GB G2 SSD and I'm assuming that it's a 330 because I got it for $85.

So my checklist is...


1. Read http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=106522
2. Read http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=108426

3. Use Acronis to Get an image of my hard drive on to an external hard drive.

4. Use Acronis to put image onto SSD.

5. Use Acronis AlignTool - Intel SSD Edition to align the partition

6. Use Intel toolbox to provide garbage collection.

And no I don't want to use W7 (yet). If you want to comment on that you can read the links in step one and two.

If I'm missing something, please let me know.

One thing I'm not sure of is adjusting the BIOS from compatible to ACHI

fefrie wrote:
I bought a used Intel 160GB G2 SSD and I'm assuming that it's a 330 because I got it for $85.

I'd expect a X-25M for that amount of money.

5. Use Acronis AlignTool - Intel SSD Edition to align the partition

I'm not too certain that this will work if you're leaving the recovery partition intact...

6. Use Intel toolbox to provide Trim Support.

There is NO native TRIM support in XP, Intel Toolbox or not...

One thing I'm not sure of is adjusting the BIOS from compatible to ACHI

Yes you should. But that will likely render your cloned drive non-bootable.

You can run in the compatible mode, but for best SSD performance/longevity AHCI is a requirement. There is *NO* proper garbage collection/manual TRIM without it.

Pretty sure it's a G2.

The model number is: SSDSA2M160G2GC

Hmm. Acronis does not recognize the drive. Not sure if there is a partition on the drive.

For fun, I put in an XP install disc to get to the partition page to see if there were any un/partitioned spaces.

The install disc did not recognize the drive.

ACHI is enabled, and the BIOS was able to regognize the drive through the hard drive test (although I didn't let the test complete)

So now I'm downloading a W7 install disc and see if I can use that to format and align the partition properly, then put the image on that.

Is it possible that I have a dud drive?

Step 1.5: Use Gparted to create a 1mb partition to hopefully align the XP os partition. Continued with the rest of the Acronis installation.



Seems good.

The internet doesn't seem that much faster, and opening and closing stuff is ok.

Snappier? We'll see. I still have to analyze to see if the partition is aligned properly....

Using Gparted and creating a 1mb partition before the actual partition seems to work.

Acronis partition alignment tool seems to report that copying the image onto the ssd has yielded no problems at all.

Just seems to run faster (I guess).

Starting Windows Media Player running a Blueray movie file runs pretty quick with no lag.

I've used only 50gb of the 150gb available on the drive, so I'm guessing that I'll run the SSD toolbox only once every six to eight weeks.

I did luck out that the t60 on the HDD was already running ACHI already, so when I put the image onto the ssd, I didn't have to do a lot of work to enable ACHI and make sure that all the drivers would work properly.

Well lately it's gone sort of terrible.

Not that I've noticed that it's slow, but the numbers don't look good.

I'm wondering if it's because I turned off write back caching on the ide driver?

Should I leave it on?




I'm wondering if a quick image/acronis disk wipe would help.

Looks like it was the write caching.

All is normal. Although I see that the sequential write and read numbers are down a bit. I'm assuming it's because I can't defrag the drive of which is probably pretty fragged.

fefrie wrote:Looks like it was the write caching.

All is normal. Although I see that the sequential write and read numbers are down a bit. I'm assuming it's because I can't defrag the drive of which is probably pretty fragged.

Defragging is not necessary on an SSD, because seek times are effectively zero, due to the lack of physical moving parts.

What happens on SSDs is that write speeds slow down after a while as they get filled up and re-written again. This is because XP does not have built in TRIM like Win 7 and other OSes have. So, it sounds like it's time to run your Intel utility / manual TRIM and this may restore some/all of your speed back again (i.e., do that instead of defrag to restore speed).

Did you clean, diskcheck, and defrag your platter hard drive before transferring the image to the SSD? Perhaps one issue could be if the source platter drive is fragmented then that is the image that will be transferred to the SSD?

The original drive wasn't defragged, but that inital test was when the image was first put on the ssd.

It's only down maybe 10 or so points, not noticeable, It's just that I notice the CDM numbers.

I did run the SSD tool box.