HDD question

Quote from Ohaiyo : So I am building a computer from scratch and I have ordered all of the parts. I am building a p67 with I5 2500K. I also bought the 128 SDD that was up two days ago. My main question is is that I was wondering if i could plug in my hard drive i pulled from a laptop that has died on me into this computer. Also if that much is correct, Would i be able to boot the OS from that hard drive? It should have it on there already. Editt:: I thnk i researched this a little bit and have found that windows has to be reinstalled and the drive, if i were to use it, needs to be formatted before used. I was planning to install the OS on my SDD anyways. However, Would it be possible to install the drive and still open it? I would like to take the files off of it before I format it and use it as a slave. Thanks! ps. Sorry if this was in the wrong forum. Would a moderator please move it to the proper thread? Thank you!

You shouldnt have any issues plugging that laptop drive in as long as it is SATA. As long as your laptop isnt too ancient, its likely that it is SATA. Since the laptop uses a 2.5" drive, if you want to install it into a desktop you will need an adapter. Since it is a mechanical drive, its not a good idea to let it just hang there. Look the model number of the drive up online so you can see the stats of it because it may be 5400RPM and slower than the usual, 7200 RPM, drives.

Have you researched how to install windows, or any other OS, onto an SSD drive? You will want to look into "Image Alignment". Its not the end of the world if its not properly aligned but it can increase performance. Win 7 is supposed to recognize an SSD and install itself accordingly but sometimes that is not the case. There are also numerous tweaks you will want to run in windows like turning off write caching, indexing, and a few others. There is an app you can google called SSD Tweaker that will do most of the fixes for you. Before you install windows, make sure to set the Hard drive operation mode to AHCI and pay attention to what ports you are using on your motherboard itself. Some boards feature different disk controllers for different ports. AHCI offers the best performance for SSD's as well as SMART disk monitoring.

Expect to run out of space if you are gaming alot. Steam wont let you install games to multiple drives. Same goes with Origin. I install all my stand alone, non steam, games to a secondary drive and I have to pick and choose what games to have installed. Maybe one day RAID 0 will support trim and the other functions that keep SSD's running fast and smooth.

Once you get your system up and running, you should be able to plug that second drive in and view the files. You may have to go to disk manager, within windows, to initialize it since it used to be an OS drive. Leave the secondary drive off during your windows install to make things easier on you.

One last tip, make an image backup of your system BEFORE you install all your games (keeps the backup smaller). Basically get the system built, OS installed, drivers updated, windows updates, and get a good full system backup. You can use windows backup found in win 7 or PM me and ill help you build a Ghost Bootable USB.

Thanks for your help!

I would definitely give you rep if i could but i think this was in the wrong forum >.>

OP - here's my advice. I recently built a rig and installed Win 7 on an HDD while waiting for my SSD to get delivered. Just do a clean install. If you really want to keep your data, copy it to an external hard drive from your old hard drive. Then format it and use it as a secondary storage drive while running (a clean install of) Windows and all programs from the SSD.