(See Ed Bott's Windows 7 and SSDs: Setup secrets and tune-up tweaks.) You can, of course, 'clone' a laptop hard drive to an SSD, but that will produce an SSD that's set up to work as a hard drive. These routines are not needed with SSDs, and the defragging can be considered harmful. For example,Windows 7 optimises the hard drive using Prefetch and Superfetch, and does some automatic defragmentation. However, hard drives and SSDs are not the same, and Windows 7 – the only version of Windows designed to work with SSDs – treats them differently. Swapping one hard drive for another is generally pretty simple, because you can 'clone' one to the other. In other words,if you intend to do this, you need to know what you are doing, and you should be prepared to take responsibility. Also, if something goes wrong with your PC, the manufacturer is unlikely to support it, and would probably ask you to replace the original hard drive.

You can do this fairly easily, and you will get some benefits, but the SSD is unlikely to work at its best.

However, many manufacturers supply SSDs in hard drive-style cases so that the SSD can be slotted into an ordinary laptop, replacing the original hard drive.

These PCs may well use SSDs that resemble sticks of memory chips, like the Toshiba Blade X-gale first used in Apple MacBook Airs. If you want to use an SSD as the system disk in a PC running Windows 7, it would be best to buy a new PC that has been designed for the purpose. Of course, if you are using a laptop on mains power, you can set the hard drive to keep running all the time, and minimise this particular problem. This can make a laptop with an SSD feel much more responsive. SSDs don't spin, and don't need to be restarted, so they can be read instantly. When a program wants to read that hard drive, you have to wait until it gets back up to speed. SSDs are particularly beneficial in laptops where the hard drive is allowed to stop spinning when it's not in use. Programs load quicker, and Windows 7 should boot faster, perhaps in about 30 seconds instead of 45 seconds (plus or minus 15 seconds). This provides an increase in performance. The SSD's main advantage is that it can read data very much faster than traditional hard drives. Could explain what exactly you need to do if you want to use an SSD as the system disk on a Windows 7 computer? Thanks, AllenĪn SSD is a solid state disk drive, which means it is based on flash memory chips rather than rapidly rotating magnetic disks.

New solid state drive not detected