hi berkz!
Short version> ok, SSd fitted.
Long version>
first time round I went the lazy way (at least I thought it'd be the lazy way) and cloned the drive. this worked after a fashion but on resetting the register and BIOS to accept AHCI it wouldn't boot. I suspected the drivers so tried to download new ones from MS.com but none of them would install, I kept getting a "your system does not reach miinimum hardware requirements" pop up.
so, I bit the bullet and reinstalled W7. it still didn't set up AHCI by default but with the registry edit and BIOS setting I was able to get it to work. (shouldn't it have done it by default if that's what teh OS drive needs?)
Then the windows system partition was topped out and couldn't be extended because the main partition was adjacent. go go partition mover thing and after several reboots and much coffee that is sorted now
zoom zoom zoom super fast numbers.
then overnight W7 does some automagic update thingy and then it stops booting again. turning the AHCI back off again stabilised the boot it but acc to benchmark the random read is about 1% of what it was when it was switched on
. I can't really speak for RL performance as I spent the whole time cocking about with it rather than playing games.
my MoBo is SATA 2 (not 3) so I'm restricted there. my BIOS is R1 (latest on GIGABYTE webby is R24 or something) ... so I was thinking about reflashing in the hope that this might clear the AHCI problem but scared somewhat shitless that I'll bake the whole thing and end up new MoBo shopping
The upshot>
so result is it feels faster than before (numbers for sequential read/write are roughly double the HDD acc to benchmark, random write is loads better but random read is marginal wrt HDD and about 1% of the number with AHCI switched on), I have bloody cavernous storage (OK, I had that before but it feels bigger now it's discrete) but ofc having spent the money I want to squeeze the performance that I can from the SSD.
oh, and Xcom is fun, also picked up the Banner saga (not tried it yet but looks very pretty) and Mirrors edge for a quid or something but it kept crashing and now won't start, which is a bummer as I enjoyed the tutorial (it crashed just as the sparring program started up and now won't start....)
anyhoo, off to the pyrenees for half term (mrs B gets the week off from the little darlings) so probably can't do much about it till I get back and not done anything about the GFX yet so prolly try to fix / break it some more when I get back