What does a newbie have to do before I installing first SSD drive?

[Denis54]

My first SSD drive should arrive tomorrow.

I plan to make a complete backup of my existing HD and then take it off my computer.

What do I have to do before I do a clean install of Windows 7 on my new SSD?

Do I need to setup my IDE configuration to ACHI?

How can I find if I have the right RAID/ACHI drivers?

What else do I need to check and/or setup? Newbie here!

My motherboard is a 3 ½ years old ASUS P5B-Plus with ICH 8 that supports ACHI.

My system is overclocked. Should I revert to stock speed?

 

[razel]

What I would do? Assuming you have an optical drive that is SATA, I would unplug it's SATA and power and connect it to the SSD. Win7 should detect ask you for format it. That'll be plenty to align. Then I usually run HDTach to do a quick read bench to see if everything is working fine and within spec.

Then I'd check to see if I am in ACHI. If you're already there then I'd skip the clean Win7 install. I'd check the manufacturer's of both the SSD and HDD websites to see if they offer any free cloning software and while both the HDD and SSD are connected do a direct disk clone. Have fun and don't do too much write benchmarking if the read benchmarks are fine.

 

[snouter]

I'd check the firmware version, and if needed upgrade the firmware BEFORE you install Windows and your apps.