trial install on SSD

I have a good installation of Win7 x64 on a hard drive, but I wanted to try out a solid state drive for the OS. Bought a relatively cheap 30Gb SSD on sale to install the OS on. I'd like to leave my existing installation alone, and do a fresh install on the SSD, then compare performance by switching between the boot drives in BIOS.

Do I assume correctly that I can run from the SSD for up to 30 days before either activating the SSD install, or abandoning the SSD and continuing to use the existing hard drive install? Will I run into issues with validation, especially if I like the SSD speed and make that my permanent installation, abandoning the hard drive install? Will validation be rejected because I changed the boot drive?

Would also like to hear any opinions of whether the SSD is too small, or not worth the effort. It's got decent read performance, but pretty bad write performance (for an SSD). FWIW, it's a Kingston "ssdNOW V series" 30Gb.

1) Correct assumption.
2) No issues.
3) Not at all.

That SSD is a perfect, inexpensive option for users looking to combine mass mechanical storage with an SSD as the boot drive (the ideal configuration for Windows).

Once you switch to the SSD, however, there are several tweaks you must make:
1) Move the swap file from C: to a mechanical hard drive.
2) Disable Superfetch.
3) Disable the Windows Indexing Service.
4) Disable automatic/scheduled defrag.
5) Disable 8.3 names.

These features, if left enabled, will prematurely degrade an SSD's lifetime as they perform frequent and unnecessary writes to the disk that do not improve performance on a system configured with an SSD.

I have an Intel 40 gig SSD. I have Windows 7 pro, Microsoft Office pro 2007, Nortorn Internet security suite, and Photoshop elements 8. I have 14 gigs of space left. I also have 2 WD 320 7200 hard drives for storage and other programs. You will love the SSD, boot times are super quick, and programs like Office word and publisher launch instantly.

My system drive (with programs) is only 32gig (not SSD). Running XP. Never looked like running out of space. Any space hungry files like music, video and photos goes onto a cheap IDE 1TB drive.
For my upgrade I'm thinking of going to a SSD (drives) as I want to mirror RAID the system.

GRP, have you put some programs (other then the OS) on your SSD and other programs on a conventional HDD.?

GRP, have you put some programs (other then the OS) on your SSD and other programs on a conventional HDD.?[/QUOTE]

I have several programs running on another drive. I also assigned "MY Documents, pictures music etc to a conventional storage drive. When I installed the progams, when asked where do I want it to install, I just changed the drive letter. It automatically created a folder called program files on the drive I choose.