Toshiba Tecra M7 Win XP Pro to SSD

[Old Guy]

Used Macrium Reflect Free 6 to clone the HDD to the Samsung SSD.
Cloned two partitions: C: and hidden restore partition.
Successful clone.

Used EaseUS to adjust partitions while SSD attached through USB to SSD
adapter.
Successful partition configuration.

Swapped in the SSD and booted.
Says HAL.dll missing.

I went into BIOS and do not see any problem.
Set BIOS to do diagnostics and booted. All diagnostics including
memory tests passed OK.

Was this a Macrium clone failure?
Was this a EaseUS partition adjust failure?

Suggestions please.

[Paul]

Old Guy wrote:
> Used Macrium Reflect Free 6 to clone the HDD to the Samsung SSD.
> Cloned two partitions: C: and hidden restore partition.
> Successful clone.
>
> Used EaseUS to adjust partitions while SSD attached through USB to SSD
> adapter.
> Successful partition configuration.
>
> Swapped in the SSD and booted.
> Says HAL.dll missing.
>
> I went into BIOS and do not see any problem.
> Set BIOS to do diagnostics and booted. All diagnostics including memory
> tests passed OK.
>
> Was this a Macrium clone failure?
> Was this a EaseUS partition adjust failure?
>
> Suggestions please.

I would have cloned first, replace the internal drive
with the SSD and worked from there.

Paul

[Old Guy]

Late last night, because I could not sleep, I first did the clone
(again) of both HDD partitions, replaced the SDD into the laptop, then
did the partition adjustments.
That all worked.

I was in too much of a hurry on the first go.
Lesson learned ... maybe.

[Old Guy]

Samsung Magician runs all optimizers but the SSD performance is rather
poor according to Magician.

The SSD performance according to me is good ... much faster than the
HDD but then I did increase RAM from 1G to 4G (the max).

Anyway Magician says AHCI is not enabled.
How much difference can that make?

BIOS shows no option for AHCI.
But there is a BIOS update that I downloaded and am afraid to do.
So holding off unless I really need to do.

[Paul in Houston TX[_2_]]

Old Guy wrote:
> Samsung Magician runs all optimizers but the SSD performance is rather poor according to
> Magician.
>
> The SSD performance according to me is good ... much faster than the HDD but then I did
> increase RAM from 1G to 4G (the max).
>
> Anyway Magician says AHCI is not enabled.
> How much difference can that make?

Not usually any noticeable improvement to humans. At least not to me.

> BIOS shows no option for AHCI.
> But there is a BIOS update that I downloaded and am afraid to do.
> So holding off unless I really need to do.

[Paul]

Old Guy wrote:
> Samsung Magician runs all optimizers but the SSD performance is rather
> poor according to Magician.
>
> The SSD performance according to me is good ... much faster than the HDD
> but then I did increase RAM from 1G to 4G (the max).
>
> Anyway Magician says AHCI is not enabled.
> How much difference can that make?
>
> BIOS shows no option for AHCI.
> But there is a BIOS update that I downloaded and am afraid to do.
> So holding off unless I really need to do.

AHCI does a couple things.

1) Command queuing for out-of-order completion
(useful on rotating hard drives)

2) Hotplug (only useful for data drives - you
can't eject the OS drive)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Command_Queuing

An SSD responds so quickly, you're not likely to get
much of a queue building under normal usage. And there
is no traveling salesman problem with an SSD - the seek
time is the same no matter where you go on the SSD drive,
so there is no advantage to re-ordering the commands
to be completed.

Seek Config
12ms Hard drive
1ms SSD in USB2 enclosure
0.1ms SSD on SATA (20us to 100us, 20us is a Flash chip limitation)

This could change for certain flavors of TRIM. I can't
get a clear story, but there was some deal about
batching up TRIM and sending a whole bunch of them,
holding up the SSD for a bit.

But TRIM doesn't work on WinXP anyway, so that's moot.
WinXP doesn't generate TRIM, so there is nothing to
pass to the drive for better garbage management.
Maybe the Magician has options for this, like
doing an offline update of TRIM info somehow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

"Enabling unsupported operating systems

Where the filesystem does not automatically support Trim,
some utilities can send trimming commands manually. Usually
they determine which blocks are free and then pass this list
as a series of trimming commands to the drive. These utilities
are available from various manufacturers (Intel, G.Skill) or
as general utilities (hdparm since v9.17).

TRIM increases the size of the "unused pool" of sectors.
If you have a 100GB drive with 20GB of data, with TRIM
working, the drive knows the other 80GB are not used.
Without TRIM, once the drive is well used, it thinks
all 100GB have data in place (since by then all the
sectors are non-zero, or the usage tables note at
least one usage). So in a sense, TRIM makes the SSD
more aware about the file system resting on it.

HTH,
Paul