PC Hardware → Bought an SSD, now what?

Have an SSD that I bought in hopes of making things faster. Trying to figure out how to best use it - read most performance improvement with least amount of effort. So I'm looking for suggestions and if I have to crack the re-install nut I will, but didn't want to unless it would really make a difference versus doing something else. Any suggestion/real life experiences would be welcome. Thanks.

- How much faster will things get if the OS is re-installed and make the SSD my C: drive?

- What about simply re-installing the most commonly used apps onto the SSD?

- Would simply using it for data and temp space yield much performance boost?

Considerably.You will typically want to utilize the SSD for whatever will benefit the most from it. It wasn't cheap when compared to conventional platter storage. Put it in the best place. If you spend a lot of time accessing data and temp space go ahead. If not it will probably suit you better as a boot drive.

The performance with SSD comes in the form of utilizing flash memory for read/write versus platters & heads in conventional hard drives. Flash memory is considerably quicker.

Even if you had offered specifics about your actual system there would be no logical way to say how -much- quicker things would be. It will be quicker though, many times much much quicker.

For best results you want to reinstall. Will it be faster if you just do a clone and be done with it? Sure, most likely.

Either way, turn off defrag right away. It's really not needed with Flash memory and unnecessarily reduces the potential read/write life on the drive.

If you want useful benchmark data (performance data) google the manufacturer/model of your particular drive + "benchmark". I guarantee it will be out there. You can compare this to benchmarks of your old/existing drive.

To offer a personal anecdote my laptop used to take ~2 minutes to boot fully with a 7200rpm sata drive. After the fresh reload with my new SSD I am up & running in about 12 seconds from a cold "off" status. Standby resume takes less than 5 seconds. Hibernate is around 8 seconds including BIOS screen flashing. Win 7.

Put your OS on the SSD, I have 7 Home Premium on my desktop. I always turn it off when I'm done using it, elapsed time from pressing the "on" button to ready to use is 30 secs.

Having had my SSD for 2yrs now, I can report:

* After using a Ghost image of my OS/C: drive v. re-install, I decided not to use an image of my old drive. I wanted a clean install of the OS so there are no strap-hanging issues going forward. Obviously (even with MHDD), the re-install was much quicker than the image. The image contains all the bloat of old programs, existing programs, hanging .dlls, etc...

* For the most part, that's what I did (most common - Office and productivity - non-cache intensive). If it was a small insignificant app, I'd put it there as well. If the app gave me options on cache location, I put it on my "data" drive.

* Using it like a RAM drive is not in your best interest. The SSDs perform better as a "read" drive rather than a "write" drive. I haven't heard anything to the contrary on this even in the SATAIII drives.

* You brought up a hot-keyword, SSD. I'd imagine you will get many responses to your questions. The experts should be along shortly, I'm giving you my experience.