Possible to add SSD as main drive later?

[Johnson184]

Hey guys,
I'm planning on building my first gaming computer, and I've heard SSD really helps out with games like World of Warcraft. I'm thinking about buying a Rampage III Gene motherboard to take advantage of the 6gbs, and I'm considering picking up the 128GB Crucial C300. The read speed is up to 355 mb/s, but I hear Sandforce will be releasing their own 6gbs drive before Christmas... apparently reaching speeds over 500 mb/s!

Basically what I'm wondering is this... can I use a 1TB 7200rpm drive as my only drive, and 4-5 months down the line... use a SSD as my boot/main drive while retaining everything on my 1TB drive as a 2nd drive? I don't want to lose everything!

 

[postmortemIA]

yes. if you partition your first disk into two partition where 1st one has approx size of SSD, as SSDs have much smaller sizes. Then you'll copy your 1st partition to new (ssd) drive.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

It depends on what you mean by "lose everything".

If you mean just losing your data, there's zero concern for that, provided you don't pull an oops and format your 1TB.

If you mean you don't want to reinstall everything, then you need to look into all the threads on here about imaging to an SSD. You need to worry about partition alignment, so some imaging programs don't work quite right. I don't have any more details because I will always opt to reinstall myself and I haven't really read those threads. But I know there are a lot on the forum here.