Just bought an Intel SSD 320 Series 120GB - have 3 questions (including Steam)

Hi all!

I just bought an Intel SSD 320 Series 120GB and I have a few questions I didn't see answered in the threads in the sticky (at least not in the first few pages):


1 First, how should I go about starting ? - I'm planning on connecting it as a secondary drive for now, see if it's working properly, and install the firmware update utility to see if there is any new firmware available (I doubt it, given this SSD has a pack date of 23 May 2011, but anyway, it might happen), and only then connecting it as the primary.

Is this the right thing to do first ?


2. After that, I don't intend on using the free Intel application to migrate the Windows installation because mine is still the one I installed way back in 2009, and it's missing a few files (courtesy of many GPU driver uninstall utilities) that doesn't allow me to install SP1 despite my efforts, so I'm grabbing the opportunity to have a fresh install too.

So, I'm going to do a fresh install, but leaving the 1TB HDD as it is just for safeguard for now.


My question here is: I've got a lot of games on Steam. Is there a way to migrate the games to the new 'installation' ? I don't have enough space on the SSD for all the games, so the goal here is to leave all of them on the HDD (for now, eventually moving one or another onto the SSD for fast performance), but make Steam realize they are installed.

There is this application that lets you move games from the HDD to the SSD and vice-versa, but that is once they are installed, so this is not the case.

I will have to backup all the games, won't I ? I mean, there are registry keys that I can't just tell Steam to look into the older Windoes 7 installation, right ?

This will probably be the task taking up most of the time, isn't it ? Or is ther a faster way to do it ?


By the way, this is a silly question, but, can I setup Steam to be installed on the SSD and the downloaded games be installed on the HDD ? Or will I have to download them to the SSD and then move them to the HDD ?

Alternatively, I can install Steam onto the HDD (can I ? I don't even remember what the Steam install routine does, since it's been more than a year since I installed the Steam client), and it will then download all the games to the HDD, right ? This has the inconveninet of Steam taking more time to load at system startup.


3. Regarding defragmentation, a question that was asked before but I didn't find the answer. Windows 7 knows it is an SSD and will NOT defragment this drive, right ? Or do I have to do some tweaking ? I'm assuming not, but just checking.


Thanks in advance !

1. I am going to use the SSD as my primary drive. What did you understand from what I wrote ?

What I asked was what I should do first.

2. Ok

3. Thanks! Will be a useful list of tips

But in those instructions it tells people to disable Defragmenting for everything. So there is no way of leaving defragmenting for the HDD's on ? I can always use Auslogics defragmenter, but I wonder it Windows is really this stupid to include an SSD in it's drives that can be defragmented list.

Just found the answer to my third question:


Source.

So, no need to follow those steps in that guide.

That is my plan. But that was not the question either...

Haha, this thread will be eight months tomorrow!

Yes, I figured out how to make things work, thanks. It wasn't an easy job though. I made a crucial mistake which was not removing my primary HDD when I installed the OS on the SSD, which means that to this day I still have the master boot record on the HDD, and I had to enable priviliges on the HDD so that I could delete files.

Also, I left all the Steam games in the HDD and just installed Steam onto the original directory, but some games like GTA IV wouldn't work properly even tough Steam appeared to have done its thing. I had to redownload that game, and I'm not sure if others too, it's been a long time now.

I thought that GTA IV would benefit from being on the SSD given that it is constantly streaming, so I used Steam Mover to put it on the SSD, but it didn't really help, my CPU is the bottleneck (or the game engine).

Apart from that, I haven't had a single problem with the SSD, and I haven't even bothered to install the patch that supposedly fixes (some people say it doesn't) the 8 MB bug which can happen if the computer is not properly shutdown too many times (mainly due to a power loss, but probably can also happen if the computer crashes due to a hardware fault).

Cheers!
Edited by tpi2007 - 2/18/12 at 6:58pm