Adding SSD to XPS 17 L702x

Just added an SSD to my XPS 17 L702x, and it was easy enough that I thought I'd mention here what I did.  Especially since I was looking for this sort of article here before I started on this, and couldn't find anything useful.  I should add that I put an SSD in my XPS desktop about a year and a half ago, and it's doing great, so I already know the SSD ropes a bit, and how much performance improves when you do this.

After a lot of research on SSD's, I ended going with an Intel 502 series 120GB model.   It's a new model, but it is SATA III, which is nice.

When I put an SSD in my XPS desktop I did it with a fresh Windows 7 install.  That was a lot of work, and re-tweaking to get it back to where it was before I put in the SSD took a lot of time.  After going through all that, I decided to try an alternative method.  For my laptop, I was going to migrate the OS image on my C: drive to the SSD, so I had deliberately kept my C; drive slim (less than 40GB), and put anything large on the second hard drive.  This would preserve all the work that I had done on my laptop with updating drivers from the Dell site to improve it's stability (and that really did help to improve its stability), and all the customizing that I had done for personal use.

After a lot of looking around at the various ways that other people had migrated their OS's to SSD's, I found that Paragon Migrate OS to SSD version 2 was mentioned here and there.  The thing that I liked about what I read was that it also takes care of disk alignment issues, so that I should get maximum SSD performance without a fresh install.  So I put in the SSD in place of the second hard drive, and ran the migration software.  It took about 5 minutes to write the C: drive contents to the SSD drive.  Most of the time doing this I spent fiddling with the many teensy-weensy screws involved with moving the disks around, that was the worst of it.  

After the SSD had the contents of the C: drive migrated to it, I rebooted and went into the BIOS to set the laptop to boot off of the second hard drive, just to see what I had.  I was very happy to see the system boot from the SSD much more quickly, and then ran the Window Experience thing, and had my SSD register a 7.9 on that simple benchmark.  The older SSD on my XPS desktop registered a 7.7, this indicated to me that the newer SSD was indeed faster.   Everything looked sane...I did notice that the migration software did not migrate the recovery (Dell) partition to the SSD, but now I also have the original C: drive as a spare hard drive if I need to recover the system.  That strikes me as better than the Dell recovery partition, but that's just my opinion.

Now I took out the old C: drive (the first hard drive), moved the SSD to where it was, and put the old second hard drive back in.  And rebooted, stopping at the BIOS to change it to boot from the first hard drive.

At this point I was pretty happy, and proceeded to get rid of some stuff off the SSD, decreasing the paging file from 8GB to 1GB (since I have 8GB of main memory, I don't expect to ever need to swap to run stuff), turned off hibernation and got rid of the hibernation file (since I'm perfectly happy with the time to wake from sleep with an SSD), and turned down the system recovery maximum space from 5% to 3%.  I also downloaded the Intel SSD Toolbox, very useful thing to have with an Intel SSD *smile*.  The Intel SSD Toolbox did one more little tuning tweak for me.  This all left me with a very fast, solid laptop, with less than 20GB on the C: in use, lots of space for future OS and program expansion.  And still have the 500GB second hard drive.

So the end result is that I'm much happier with my laptop now just about everything goes at top speed *smile*.  The laptop already had a nice processor and memory, this just adds speed for boot and for bringing up programs...for just about anything where the disk is involved.