Thinking of an SSD drive...

[pro2a]

The SSD has intrigued me and I am considering getting one as a primary drive. I like how they are faster, and seem to load faster. I need to know a few things first. I have a OEM copy of Windows 7. Can I format my primary drive now and still reinstall Win 7 onto an SSD drive and make that my primary? I don't know if OEM copies of Windows are HDD specific or if they are more MoBo specific.

Secondly, will SDD drives plug into SATA connectors on my MoBo? I would imagine so since SATA is kind of the standard now.

Anything else I need to know before I get one and try it out? My system specs are below. Thanks!

 

[Oreo]

Not sure about the windows thing.

95percent of SSD's use the normal SATA2. The rest use SATA3 and PCI-E (PCI-E are in the $1000+ range). There are quite a lot of things you should know.

In your bios, set the sata mode to AHCI and the sata controller to AHCI too BEFORE you install Windows 7. I can not stress this enough, i screwed it up several times. You can not switch to AHCI after installing windows 7 easily. AHCI mode has a speed increase and supports TRIM better than normal IDE mode.
Once windows 7 is installed, there are some things you should do. Disable hibernate > Hibernate - Enable or Disable - Windows 7 Forums check trim is on Enabling TRIM support in Windows 7 enable write caching on the drive (google it, plenty of information) and disable drive indexing (seek times are so slow you don't need it) also disable defrag. Doesn't benefit your SSD at all. Move temp folders off the SSD (SSD's have limited writes, temporary files are constantly being written to) EeeUser Forum / Can I help the SSD, if I move TEMP folders permanently to SDHC?.
If you have firefox do this:

Firefox
Since SSD's have limited write-cycles, Firefox's behavior of writing cache files to disk is not good. We can force Firefox to write the data to RAM instead by doing the following:

Type about:config into the address bar and press enter.
Set the value of browser.cache.disk.enable to false.
Create a new integer value named disk.cache.memory.capacity and set its value to 32768 (for 32MB), 65536 (for 64MB), or 131072 (for 128MB).
Restart Firefox.

This will apply to Firefox on any operating system. You will notice increased RAM usage from the program, so if you're low on RAM, I recommend waiting on this one.

Try not to abuse your SSD, you will put it into a hammered state (I did it). Once windows 7 is installed run one ASSO benchmark and one AS SSD benchmark to check all is in order and leave it. However please note all ssd's perform differently on different computers, and your results can differ quite a bit from someone else using the same drive. For me, i installed windows 7 and then my key applications such as firefox, chrome,, vlc player, and one game that i play the most and that is it.

Generally bigger SSD's are faster. Don't get me wrong, i got my 60GB SSD and it's still really quick. But the 120gb version is quicker.

That's pretty much it, although I'm sure i missed a few things. the ocztechnologyforum a really good place to look at for SSD help especially if you own an OCZ SSD.