Using Acronis with SSDs....

[ckett]

Hello,

I plan to do a fresh install on an Intel X25M G2 SSD. The SSD will have only one partition. Once I install all of my applications I intend to use Acronis True Image to create an image (copy) of the entire SSD to an external USB hardrive formatted to NTFS. The external backup USB drive will have two partitions on it. The first partition will have the SSD Win7 image backup, the other partition will have my older Windows XP partition backup.

Will I run into any alignment problems if I decide to recover my SSD from the USB external HD?

Should I just use one external drive wit one partition per Image backup?

Thanks!!

 

[gbohn]

> Will I run into any alignment problems if I decide to recover my SSD from the USB external HD?

It seems that the answer is 'It depends'...

I just got a 160 GB G2 X25-M SSD myself. It sounds like you want to make an actual image 'copy' to the external drive.

I haven't done this, but instead I just create one or more .tib files on a 'normal' NTFS formatted drive space on both external and internal drives). There is a way to preserve alignment when doing things this way (although I can't comment on the 'copy' method).

My understanding about alignment issues at the moments are:

A) The default alignment for the first partition on a drive partitioned under XP is at
sector 63 (32,256 bytes). Some SSDs work much slower with this alignment.

Vista and Win 7 default to creating the first partition at an offset of 1 MB. This is
supposedly a much better default value (for performance) for most SSD's.

I have Vista-64 at the moment, so I made sure I started out at this alignment, just
in case (I was originally at offset 63 before the move to SSD because of previous
TI restores).

I've heard that the X25-M isn't as sensitive about this as some other
drives, but I didn't want to take any chances.

B) I've used TI 11 and TI 2010. Depending on what alignment to start with, and if you
want to keep that alignment, you may or may not have a problem.

When using TI 11 (at least) restoring an individual partition (of your main C: drive)
seemed to result in the alignment always going back to 63 sectors. If you started
out with this, and want to keep that offset, then you're o.k.

If you wanted to preserve an alignment (other than 63 sectors), you need to backup
and restore the 'entire physical drive' in one shot. For both TI 11 and Ti 2010 this seems
to preserve my 1 MB alignment.

So, I think you need to decide what alignment you want as the first step. (I ended up using the Vista recover environment to create the OS partition to get the 1 MB offset I wanted).

Hope that helps.

-Greg

 

[gbohn]

> If you wanted to preserve an alignment (other than 63 sectors),
> you need to backup and restore the 'entire physical drive' in one
> shot. For both TI 11 and Ti 2010 this seems to preserve my 1 MB
> alignment.

Just to clarify a bit more, this seems to be true when you backup and restore the entire drive to the same drive you imaged in the first place.

I'm not sure what would happen if you tried to restore the image to a different type and/or size drive. (There's the question of how to get your initial data to the target drive in the first place, verses how to preserve its layout once it's there...).

For a new install of Win 7 the first question doesn't seem like an issue (if you use the Win 7 tools to create the destination partitions). Trying to transfer the existing XP stuff seems like it should be easy if you want the default 63 sector offset.

Trying to transfer an old 63-sector offset XP image to a new partition with a 1 MB offset might be painful (At least it was for me moving my Vista C: drive to the SSD using the only technique I found that worked.)

-Greg

 

[Binky]

Use Acronis (or any other imaging software you prefer) as usual to install the image to the SSD. Then follow these intructions:

http://www.tuxyturvy.com/blog/index...g-Windows-Partitions-Without-Losing-Data.html