#FORMATTING SSD FOR WINDOWS 7 INSTALL INSTALL#
#FORMATTING SSD FOR WINDOWS 7 INSTALL UPDATE#
#FORMATTING SSD FOR WINDOWS 7 INSTALL DRIVER#

If you have a Lenovo computer, this feature is available as part of a BIOS Menu Setup Extension. For Intel drives, you can use the Intel Solid State Drive Toolbox. Do not perform a full format using Windows disk management tools. This step isnвЂ™t essential but can be helpful, especially on a well-used drive. Consider using a Secure Erase utility to reset the drive to its original, out-of-the-box state.

#FORMATTING SSD FOR WINDOWS 7 INSTALL DRIVER#

Using the legacy IDE or ATA mode prevents you from installing the proper disk controller driver later and will result in reduced performance.ДЈ. In the system BIOS, set the SATA controller for Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) operation before installing Windows.

#FORMATTING SSD FOR WINDOWS 7 INSTALL UPDATE#

Follow the instructions to complete the firmware update this typically requires booting from removable media such as a USB flash drive.Дў. YouвЂ™ll need to check with the drive manufacturer or the OEM, depending on whether you purchased the drive as a retail upgrade or as part of an OEM PC. Because firmware updates wipe out all data on the drive, you must do this operation as the first step make sure to back up all existing data first. Here are the Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT) results from July 2010 (original OEM configuration) and then from December 2010 after updating the SSD firmware and installing the latest Intel storage drivers:ДЎ. The performance difference was like night and day.

#FORMATTING SSD FOR WINDOWS 7 INSTALL INSTALL#

Because the firmware update wipes out all data on the drive, I had to do a clean install of Windows 7. Over the holidays, I decided to check again and was pleasantly surprised to learn that Dell had released a firmware update for this drive several months earlier. (Using the TRIM command allows the system to properly erase blocks of data in the background for an explanation, see this excellent article by Anand.) Windows 7 supports the TRIM command natively earlier Windows versions donвЂ™t. That update had to come from Dell, and as of last July, it wasnвЂ™t available.ДЄ third-party utility, CrystalDiskInfo, confirmed that this disk did not offer support for the TRIM command, which is one of the key requirements for proper SSD operation. The problem was that the hardware-a Samsung PB22-CS3-needed a firmware update to work properly with the advanced disk-handling features in Windows 7. I did a little research last summer and learned that a lot of Dell customers were experiencing the same disappointment with this particular hardware combination. Skip any of those steps and the results can be disappointing. In fact, there are a series of steps that must be performed before an SSD can perform to its full potential on a Windows PC. Because SSDs donвЂ™t have motors and spindles and platters and magnetic heads, they donвЂ™t benefit from those features and need to be handled differently. Features like Superfetch and Prefetch and ReadyBoot are designed to monitor files you access at startup and when you launch programs and then arrange them on the disk for optimal access. ThatвЂ™s because Windows has evolved over many years with features that specifically target the behavior of conventional hard disks. In the first installment of this series, I gathered the numbers to show just how much faster you can expect an SSD to perform in the real world.Д«ut you might need to jump through some setup hoops to get top performance out of an SSD-equipped PC running Windows 7. SSDs start and shut down fast, and they perform read operations (especially random reads) at speeds that blow the doors off conventional hard drives.

Formatting ssd for windows 7 install