Migration Expert Zone

Not all migrations involve moving from one computer or platform to another.  Sometimes, to misquote the old proverb, migration begins at home.

For years, computer users have found themselves migrating their operating systems, applications, and data from machines with older, smaller hard drives to PCs with newer, larger ones.  In most cases, this was a laborious, manual operation involving cables, connectors, and consternation.

More recently, some users have discovered a simple way to get faster performance out of their computers by adding solid state drives (SSD).  SSDs have no moving mechanical parts, which makes them considerably more rugged than their spinning-platter counterparts. They use non-volatile, solid-state, random access memory (RAM), which offers significantly faster input/output transfer speeds. 

Windows uses hard drive storage to swap “pages” into and out of memory when the applications and data running exceed memory capacity.  With spinning disks, this can slow computer performance.  With an SSD drive, there’s almost no difference between keeping information in working memory and swapping it to disk.

Here’s the “But…”

SSDs are significantly more expensive per gigabyte than traditional hard drives.  As a result, most SSDs available at reasonable prices are relatively low in capacity.  For users who are accustomed to 750GB hard drives or larger, how do you move the boot data to a 128GB SSD?

One answer is a $20 utility from Paragon Software (www.paragon-software.com), which allows you to select just the Windows Operating System--complete with boot record and Microsoft System Reserved (MSR) information, plus any other applications that will fit--for migration to the SSD.  The utility aligns partitions as required and makes the transfer once it has determined that there is sufficient SSD space.

No More Going Out to Lunch

When confronted with the prospect of having to reboot their PCs, most users try to schedule it to occur while they’re out to lunch.  Once you’ve migrated your Windows operating system to an SSD, rebooting is no longer a 5-minute-plus affair.  Most operations run dramatically faster.

Are you running Windows 7 on an SSD-equipped PC?  What has your experience been?  How did you migrate from your original hard drive to the SSD?  Please comment on this post and let us know!