Reinstalling Windows 7 on ssd. Installing Windows on SSD

The abbreviation NVMe is becoming increasingly popular among new SSD products, and especially their high-performance models based on PCI Express slots and expansion cards. This interface compares favorably with the standard disk (AHCI) in various ways, including command queue depths, peak speeds, complexity of device creation, and much more. Now the only important thing for us is that, as we know, some kind of NVMe driver is needed in order for such a disk to work in the system. Using the OCZ RD400 512 GB SSD as an example, we will look at how to install Windows 7 and 10 on an NVMe SSD from scratch. Also, by analogy, the guide is suitable for other similar M.2 drives.

Important: A few simple tips to consider before you begin installation.

• Connect the M.2 or PCI Express drive as securely as possible, secure with screws.
• Check that the drive is recognized in the BIOS
• Before installation, to avoid confusion with system partitions, it is better to disconnect other drives

Installing Windows 7 on NVMe SSD

First of all, we need to download the driver. This driver is necessary even if we do not use the SSD as a bootable system, simply because it improves the performance and reliability of working with the disk.

Applicable to the OCZ disk: go to the official website, select the disk in the menu, and only then go to the file download page. There may be a lot of useful stuff there, but this time we are interested in Windows NVMe Driver, it is suitable for Windows 7, 8.1 and 10.

Download zip archive, it should be unpacked into any folder, inside there will be content like in the screenshot. We will write this unpacked folder onto a flash drive (you can directly onto the one on which the Windows image is already ready), the main thing is that it is at hand.

We launch the Windows installer from a CD\DVD disk (or flash drive), follow the instructions, reaching the installation type, select: full installation (advanced options).

Unfortunately, our PCI Express SSD is not in the list of disks. We select the “download” option, because the Windows 7 installer does not see NVMe drives due to the lack of a built-in driver.

Click “browse” to select the path to the driver. At this stage, it’s definitely time to insert a pre-prepared flash drive with the downloaded and unpacked separate folder driver.

When choosing a folder, it is also important for us to correctly select the driver folder with the installed system bit depth: x32 for x86 systems, and x64 for 64-bit.

After selecting a folder, a driver will appear in the list, so as not to get confused in the list (there are several of them), you can check the box “hide drivers that are incompatible with your computer hardware,” which, however, must be enabled initially. Click “next” and wait for the driver installation to complete. The process takes up to a minute.

After installing the NVMe driver, the installer immediately began to see the connected PCI Express SSD and now you can do anything with it.

Installing Windows 8.1 and 10 on NVMe SSD

More modern systems already have a built-in NVMe driver, in fact even Win 7 does, but it only gets to the system with the update and is not in the installer. As a result, installation of newer systems is simplified:

The new SSD is immediately visible in the installer’s system, and you can immediately start working with it, but there is one BUT.

Remember, if you are installing two systems on SSD 7 and 10, for example, then it is better to start the installation with Windows 7, using it to create the main system partition (+ necessary for the system, created automatically), and the second partition intended for Windows 10 just leave it as an unmarked area.

Already in the Windows 10 installer, create a new system partition from the unallocated area. This is necessary due to the fact that Windows 10 cannot be installed on an MBR partition created by the Windows 7 installer; it requires a GPT partition type.

Hello! Decide to prepare an article in which you will talk about how to properly install Windows 7 on an SSD drive, and how to configure Windows 7 on an SSD drive after installation so that it works for a long time and without problems. I recently bought a laptop, took an Asus K56CM and immediately bought an OCZ Vertex 4 128 GB SSD drive for it, I really wanted to experience all the speed that an SSD gives.

In our case, the model of laptop/computer and SSD drive does not matter; my instructions can be said to be universal. I will write what needs to be done immediately after installing an SSD drive into a computer and how to configure the operating system after installation on the SSD. If this is your first time encountering an SSD, then you are probably wondering why there is such attention to configuration operating system for these drives compared to conventional hard drives. I will now explain everything in simple words.

SSD drives have a limited failure time compared to hard drives. Simply put, they have a certain number of rewrites. Now I won’t say what this number is, it varies and what is true and what is not is difficult to understand. For example, for my OCZ Vertex 4 in the characteristics it was written that the operating time between failures is 2 million hours. And the operating system writes a lot during operation, deletes and writes again various temporary files, etc. Services such as defragmentation, indexing, etc. serve to speed up the system on normal hard drives. And they only harm SSD drives and reduce their service life.

In fact, installing Windows 7 on SSD almost no different from installing on HDD. But after installation you will need to make some settings in Windows operation 7, but there is nothing complicated there either, we will do everything using the utility SSD Mini Tweaker 2.1.

What should you do before installing Windows 7 on an SSD drive?

Well, first you need to install an SSD drive in a laptop or computer, it doesn’t matter. I will not describe this process. There is nothing complicated about this, and this is a topic for another article. Let's say that you have already installed the SSD, or it has already been installed.

If you will use a regular hard drive in your computer next to the SSD drive, then I advise you to disable it while installing Windows 7, this is so that you do not get confused when choosing a partition to install the OS, but this is not necessary.

All you need to do before installation is to check whether our solid state drive is working in AHCI. To do this, go to the BIOS; if you don’t know how, read the article. Next, go to the tab "Advanced" and select the item “SATA Configuration”.

Select the item, a window will open in which we select AHCI(if you had another mode enabled). Click F10 to save settings.

Now you can begin installing Windows 7. The installation process on a solid-state drive is no different from installing on a hard drive. I just want to give you one piece of advice:

Try to install the original image of the operating room Windows systems 7, or Windows 8. I recommend installing only one of these operating systems, because only seven and eight can work with SSD drives. Do not use different assemblies, and if you install an assembly of Windows 7 or Windows 8 downloaded from the Internet, then try to choose an image close to the original one.

We install the operating system. You may find the following articles useful:

Once the operating system is installed, you can proceed to Windows setup under SSD.

Setting up Windows 7 to work with an SSD drive

More precisely, Windows 7 will work anyway, our task is to make sure that our solid-state drive lasts as long as possible and without various errors.

As I already wrote at the beginning of the article, for Windows optimization for a solid-state drive, we will use the SSD Mini Tweaker utility. You can disable all unnecessary options manually, but in the SSD Mini Tweaker program this can all be done in a few clicks. You will only need to manually disable indexing of files on local drives.

First we need to download SSD Mini Tweaker. Download version 2.1 from the link below:

There is no need to install the program, just extract it from the archive and run it.

Launch the SSD Mini Tweaker utility.

You can tick all the boxes, or rather, it’s not possible, but it’s necessary. I have checked all the boxes, except that you can leave only SuperFetch; disabling this service may increase the startup time of programs. Check the boxes for the required services and press the button “Apply changes”. Almost everything, in the same utility there is a “Manual” item, this means that you need to manually disable services. There are two of them, disk defragmentation on a schedule and indexing the contents of files on the disk.

If scheduled defragmentation is disabled automatically after the changes we have made, then indexing of files on the disk must be disabled manually on each local partition.

Disable indexing of file contents on disk

Let's go to "My computer", and right-click on one of the local drives. Select “Properties”.

A window will open in which you need to uncheck the item “Allow the contents of files on this drive to be indexed in addition to file properties”. Click “Apply”.

We are waiting for the process to complete.

When you do this procedure on drive C, you will most likely receive a message stating that you do not have rights to change system files. I just clicked “Skip all”, I think that if you skip a few files, nothing bad will happen.

That's all, setting up Windows for a solid-state drive is complete. You know, many people say that these are different myths, that nothing needs to be turned off, etc. Maybe so, but if they came up with it, then it means it’s necessary and I think that in any case it won’t hurt.

It seems that I wrote everything I wanted, if you have additions, comments, or something is not clear, then write in the comments, we’ll figure it out. Good luck!

It has already lost its leadership in quantitative indicators of active use, significantly losing to the newer and more stable (though not always and not for everyone) Windows 10, there are still a sufficient number of users who continue to give their preference to the “romance of the good old Seven” .

And actually, why not?! Windows 7 is an operating system that has been studied inside and out (as far as possible), everything possible mistakes, even quite exotic ones, have their own solutions, and it works on almost all devices.

And taking into account that installing a solid-state drive can “revive” even an obsolete computer, the combination of Windows 7 + SSD (+ HDD optional) looks quite ambitious.

Therefore, in the spring of 2019, the question of installing the “seven” on a solid-state drive continues to be in demand.

And this is exactly what will be discussed in this article.

Preparatory stage

In solving this problem, a lengthy and scrupulous preparatory stage is not required, since “brand new” SSD drives are equipped with everything necessary for installing an operating system on them.

If desired, and if you have a working computer at hand, you can check whether the system recognizes the disks, whether it is formatted and what partitioning is used by the disk. By the way, using “GPT” on Windows 7, even taking into account the capabilities of the SSD, is not entirely justified; in addition, the computer’s motherboard must comply with the functionality of this markup.

But you cannot do without a preparatory stage when creating bootable media with an image of the Windows 7 operating system of the edition you need.

Which image to use, a “hodgepodge” or a “pure” one, is up to everyone to decide for themselves, just like software to create bootable media. But as a personal recommendation, we can recommend the well-known utility “Rufus”, which has long enjoyed stable user interest. And how exactly to use this software can be found in this article using Windows 10 as an example.

Special attention should be paid to the physical installation of the disk into the case of your computer or laptop, as some may have certain difficulties with this.

It should be noted that attempting to install the operating system on an SSD connected using a SATA-USB adapter will lead to nothing.

After the disk is placed in the designated/allocated space, you need to turn on the computer and open the BIOS. The choice of key that is responsible for entering these settings depends on the manufacturer of your motherboard. For example, this role may include “DELETE”, “TAB”, “F2”, “F12” or “ESC”.

In BIOS you need to check two things:

1. Does the BIOS see this? installed drive. To do this, just open the “Advanced” tab and find the section responsible for displaying information about connected devices (volume and number);
2. This is to check in what configuration the “SATA” mode works. For solid-state drives, this is "AHCI".

If everything corresponds to the specified parameters, then press the “F10” key to save the changes and close the BIOS.

The most important step that remains is the actual installation of the OS on the SSD.

Installation

Despite the fact that installation is the key stage of the entire topic under consideration, the user has nothing special to do here.

The only thing worth touching on is the formatting and distribution of disk space.

Installer Windows already has been able to do everything for a long time necessary manipulations with disk.

The key point here is how exactly the solid-state drive will be used in the future. It’s worth noting right away that installing an SSD in HDD space- this is far from the most correct solution, since storing various files (movies, music, documents, etc.) on it will only waste the already limited disk resources.

Maximum efficiency is achieved by using a combination of SSD for the operating system, HDD for everything else (that is, just as file storage).

The final stage of the entire topic under consideration is setting the priority in the BIOS, which will set which disk to use as the default boot one.

This is done in the “Bootdevicepriority” section.

Conclusion

So, the procedure for installing the Windows 7 operating system on solid-state drives was discussed above. As can be seen from the presented procedure, there is nothing complicated in this procedure, especially if the SSD drive has the standard and most common form factor of 2.5 inches.

When the entire Internet is full of holiwars on the topic “SSDs are unreliable” and “SSDs are so fast that I will never work with HDDs again,” I think it’s time to bring a little clarity to the sea of ​​contradictory information about SSDs themselves and about setting up Windows to work with them .

If anyone is interested, please see cat.

So I became the proud owner of this miracle of modern technology: OCZ Vertex 3 120 Gb. First I booted into old system and updated the SSD firmware, because... The OCZ firmware program does not allow updating the firmware when the disk is a system one. I think updating the firmware is the first thing you need to do after purchasing an SSD, because... As practice shows, there are plenty of errors in firmware, especially in new SSD models (compared to which Vertex 3 is not the newest :)).
Next, I decided to install a clean system on the SSD. Windows installation 7 from a flash drive (USB 2.0) took about 10 minutes. Wow, I thought, before, installing some heavy programs took much longer, not to mention the operating system!

From that moment on, I could just start using a super fast drive and enjoy life, but I couldn’t shake the paranoid feeling that my SSD would quickly break due to frequent overwrites. Indeed, the limited number of SSD rewrite cycles is not yet a myth. But everyone already knows that even a resource of 10,000 rewrites is very, very much with a disk capacity of 120 Gb. Depending on the controller, the SSD can also use various internal technologies for wear leveling, relocation of data from one place to another, compression of recorded data (relevant for SandForce controllers) - the disk tries its best to work quickly and for a long time :) How to influence this internal logic is almost impossible (except by updating the firmware), so when choosing an SSD for some special tasks, you need to look for information on the logic of its controller.

For those who take special care of the disk and protect it, there is a lot of advice on the Internet on how to reduce the write load on the disk from the operating system. These tips can be divided into useful, harmful and controversial.

1) Transferring the directory for temporary files to a regular (HDD) disk

The paths to the TEMP directories are here:
Computer – Properties – Advanced system settings – Advanced tab – Environment variables – TMP and TEMP (for the current user and general).

Some people advise transferring Temp to RAMDisk, but this is rather bad advice. This is due to the fact that some programs (including updates) write data to a temporary directory, then reboot the computer, and then expect that the data has not disappeared during this time. And the RAMDisk is cleared by default upon reboot. But even if your RAMDisk supports saving data to an image and restoring it after a reboot, this is also not a panacea, because... It is possible that the RAMDisk service simply does not have time to start and initialize by the time programs start accessing the temporary directory.

2) Disable hibernation

This is quite strange advice. On the one hand, disabling hibernation allows us to get rid of the hiberfil.sys file, the size of which is equal to the amount of RAM, and space on the SSD is especially valuable to us. Also, with each hibernation, a relatively large amount of data is written to the SSD, which “leads to wear and tear and blah blah blah blah”... Apologists for this advice write that “why do you need hibernation, because with SSD system and so it starts in a few seconds.” But personally, I need hibernation not for the sake of a quick start, but so as not to close (and then re-open) a damn bunch of applications that I constantly use, so the advisability of disabling hibernation is a big question.
I would love to move the hiberfil.sys file to another drive (HDD), but due to system limitations this is not possible.

3) Disabling system protection.

Computer – Properties – System Protection – System Protection tab – Configure – Disable system protection.
This can be done if you use at least some other means Reserve copy systems. Otherwise, there is a high risk of getting a non-working system in case of some failures.

4) Disable the paging file.

This advice causes the most heated debate, and even Microsoft could not get clear explanations.
I consider this advice to be harmful and recommend transferring the paging file to a regular (HDD) disk (but in no case to a RAMDisk:), I won’t even explain why - this information is easy to find on the Internet).
Completely disabling the paging file is harmful from the following point of view. Some "very smart" programs (for example, MS SQL Server) reserve virtual address space for themselves in very large quantities (in reserve). Reserved memory is not shown in the task manager; it can be seen, for example, in Process Explorer by turning on the display of the “Process Memory – Virtual Size” column. If there is a page file, the system reserves memory in it (that is, a certain range is declared unavailable for use by other applications). If there is no paging file, backup occurs directly in RAM. If someone can clarify in the comments (with links to reliable sources) how exactly this affects the operation of other programs and performance, I will be very grateful.

5) Disable Prefetch, ReadyBoot, and Superfetch.

5.1. Prefetch is a technology for accelerating system and application loading by proactively reading data from disk. It is only relevant for slow carriers. Since the SSD has everything in order with Random reads, Prefetch can be safely disabled.
Prefetcher stores service data in C:\Windows\Prefetch.
To disable Prefetch, you need to change the value of the Enable Prefetcher parameter in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters to 0.

5.2 ReadyBoot (not to be confused with ReadyBoost) is an addition to Prefetch that logs the loading process to determine the order and composition of the data required during loading and, based on these logs, prepares the required data to speed up the loading process.
The logs themselves are located in C:\Windows\Prefetch\ReadyBoot. Disabling Prefetcher" does not stop recording these logs. To stop logging, you need to set the Start parameter of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WMI\Autologger\ReadyBoot key to 0
Disabling ReadyBoot is generally a relatively useless tip because... This will not give any increase in speed, except to slightly reduce writes to the disk, because download logs (which are quite small, on the order of several megabytes) will not be kept.

5.3 Superfetch is a technology for preloading frequently executed programs into RAM. There is no point in disabling it, because... Superfetch does not write to disk.

6) Disable indexing

In the disk properties, you can uncheck the “Allow the contents of files on this disk to be indexed in addition to file properties.” This can reduce the size of the indexes that the Windows indexer builds, i.e. reduce the write load on the SSD.
The indexes themselves are located in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search
You can also disable the indexer completely by disabling Windows service Search.

7) Transferring application caches to RAMDisk.

By applications here we mainly mean browsers, because... They are the ones who actively use the cache of visited pages. Transferring this cache to the HDD would be quite stupid, because... We need acceleration! And therefore quite good decision is to transfer these caches to a small (for example, 1 GB) RAMDisk (personally, I use AMD Radeon RAMDisk, although despite the loud name it is a product from Dataram).
Each browser has its own way of indicating the location of the cache, this information is easy to find on the Internet.

8) Disable usn log file system NTFS.

One of the controversial and contradictory pieces of advice. On the one hand, I was unable to disable usn log for system partition. The usn log is also used by some programs (eg Everything) to track changed files. If anyone can comment on the situation regarding the usefulness of disabling usn, I would be very grateful.

UPD 9) Disabling disk defragmentation

Windows 7 should automatically disable defragmentation for SSD drives, so there is no need to configure anything manually.

Conclusions:
1. Even if you don't follow any tips for configuring your system to work with an SSD, Windows 7 will run a little less than great on an SSD.
2. Some tips will allow you to reduce the number of writes to the SSD disk, which can extend its already relatively long life.
3. Many tips will allow you to change some parameters without killing system performance, but also without giving any practical benefit :)

Other ideas and advice are highly welcome! I hope that together we can differentiate them into useful and harmful :)