Switching HD to SSD

[Tim Bateson]

Lately Corel is dragging it's feet to save files on my Windows i7 PC with Corel X6. Tonight I cloned my system onto a SSD and sometime in the next day or two will attempt to switch to it. I'm not only expecting better boot times, but really hoping the file saving speed jumps as well. It use to be barely noticeable, now I have to sit and wait for each save to complete.

Anyone here had a chance to do this yet?

[lee cox]

If your hard drive slows down defrag it and make sure power saving mode does not shut down the machine until the defrag is done. As you get close to capacity on a hard drive they slow down as they are having to seek space here and there to write files which slows response time.

[Tim Bateson]

PCmatic does that for me. I just checked the system defrag & it showed last defraged on the 25th and still at 0% fragmentation.

[Glen Monaghan]

How full is the drive? You generally don't want your system drive getting anywhere near full as that bogs the system down.

[David Somers]

Tim, I havent switched to an SSD yet but hope to. Camelcamelcamel (a 3rd party Amazon price watcher just advised me of a big price drop on Samsung 1T SSD's into the $240 range which is quite good.

But, if your machine is young enough to be an I7 (duo core or quad?) and a decent amount of RAM my first guess is you need to first, look at how your Windows 10 Virtual Memory is setup. If you are using the default settings it is likely that it is dynamic, changing as needed. As your disk gets fragmented so does this file and it becomes a drag on your speed, including disk writing. Look at what Windows is recommending its default size should be. Make note of it and Quadruple that number on your note. Then turn off Virtual Memory. Windows will complain mightily. Ignore it. Reboot. When you come back up defragment your current Hard Disk/ When it is done, do it again, and possibly after that a third time. Each time will be faster. Once that is done go back into Virtual memory, turn it on and set it to that quadrupled number you made note of. Set that as the minumum and maximum size. Now virtual memory will not keep changing its size and getting fragmented. Reboot once you save that setting.

Then, disable a bunch of programs that are likely running that you are unaware of by going into Windows Task Manager and choosing the Startup Tab. You can disable everything there without harm. If you later determine you want to have something autostart you can always come back and re-enable it. This will boost your startup and give the machine more oomph since fewer things will be running at the outset.

Lastly, clear all your caches in the machine.

Here is a link to a decent article on this and some other things you can do to boost performance.
http://searchenterprisedesktop.techt...rvice-settings

Unfortunately with Windows you may have to do these once a year or so. Just the nature of Windows. The Mac OS is much better at managing these issues on the fly.

Hope this helps you!

[Tim Bateson]

90%. I plan to use the SSD for the OS and all Programs and active work. Things that are only needed once a year or are archived from older jobs will be on the HD. This should create a lot of space on both the old HD and keep a lot of free space on the SSD. Of-course I also run a backup job once or twice a day to one of my networked drives.

[David Somers]

Glen is right about space. 75% full is about max before you see a noticeable slowdown. That is true on Macs too. And, having said that, if you are 90% full I would almost guarantee you are having issues with fragmentation and your virtual memory file. Clean up before you do any of the things I described above.

[Tim Bateson]

...if your machine is young enough to be an I7 (duo core or quad?) ...

Quad with 16 GB 1333 DIMMs

I do a lot with this computer. Currently as I'm typing this I am running 4 security camera monitors, My Christmas Light show - it's huge (www.liberty-laser.com/Christmas), Corel X6, and watching Dish on my dual monitors. Still am only using 5 GB with 11 GB free.

I will look into the Virtual Memory. Sounds worth checking out,

[Brian Leavitt]

I run my main computer -- the one that I use for the 3 US lasers -- off an SSD. The difference is astounding, to be honest. You will not regret it one bit. I don't have to wait for saves. My typically save file size is less than 1 MB, though. Even with larger files (60 MB+) it doesn't interrupt my work when saving. I have it set to auto backup every 5 minutes.

[Michael Hunter]

The best thing about SSD is the startup time - between 10 and 20 seconds between turning the power on and being able to start work.

One thing to note - you must never de-frag an SSD. All it needs is a "trim" command now and then to tell the SSD controller to keep things tidy.
A clean install of Windows should detect the SSD and set it up accordingly.

Because I cloned my original setup from rotating disk, I found some instructions to change the Windows automatic maintenance settings from de-frag to trim. This was complicated and painfully techy, but seems to have worked OK. The disk tools always report that the drive needs de-fragging, but activating the de-frag button returns as completed instantly.

[Bill George]

I have changed over 3 computers to Samsung SSDs. Yes I defrag, take stuff off I don't need, run a virus program and have plenty of RAM, the only one I could not upgrade RAM was a Samsung laptop go figure.
The performance improvements with the SSD was outstanding and after the first one the rest where easy. Yes boot times of about 10 seconds.

[Gary Hair]

I have all of my machines on ssd drives, just changed the last one over a couple months ago. I saw a huge increase in speed and startup/shutdown are a fraction of what they were before. Don't worry about defragging before you do the switch, that doesn't affect an ssd because there is no such thing as seek time like a spinning drive, it's all instantaneous so defragging prior to the switch is a waste of time. The Samsung software did a great job of cloning the drive, all I had to do was re-register some of the software. Oh, make sure you actually log out of Corel on the old drive before you start up the ssd for the first time, otherwise the old machine will keep one instance of Corel as being installed.

[Brian Leavitt]

Oh, make sure you actually log out of Corel on the old drive before you start up the ssd for the first time, otherwise the old machine will keep one instance of Corel as being installed.

This is worth repeating. I didn't do this when I swapped to the SSD and I ended up having to have Corel clear my registrations because I couldn't log in on my laptop.

[Gary Hair]

This is worth repeating. I didn't do this when I swapped to the SSD and I ended up having to have Corel clear my registrations because I couldn't log in on my laptop.

Yep, I did that with Corel and Microsoft. Neither one took very long to get sorted out, but it could have been avoided very easily.

[Tim Bateson]

OK, took about 30min to clone 400+/- GB from HD to SSD (AOMEI Backupper - freeware). I pulled the old drive out (save keeping for now). Selected the SSD to boot, then made all of the Windows 10 SSD optimization changes & restarted again. So far no glitches & haven't found anything that won't run.