One thing you need to know before you go with an SSD. The partition must be placed correctly on the drive. The partition must be aligned with the 4k boundaries that flash memory use. If its not performance will suffer badly and the life of the drive will be shortened. Since you say you have a new laptop I’d guess its running windows 7. If so format the new drive from within windows 7. (Do not create more than one partition as this will cause problems) This will give you the correct alignment.
The next problem is what are you going to do to get your OS on the new SSD. If you are going to clone your old drive to the new drive you may be in for trouble. Your existing drive may have more than one partition such as a restore partition etc. This can and most likely will cause alignment problems. I have gotten around this problem by imaging only the system partition and restoring the image to the new drive. You loose the built in restore feature but it gets around the problem. You may have to run a repair using the windows 7 DVD.
The next problem is most clone/imaging/partitioning programs do not understand SSD’s 4k sectors. All magnetic drives from the past used 512 byte sectors and most OS’s placed the beginning of the partition at sector 63. Because of this most clone/imaging/partitioning programs do the same. (New programs should fix this problem but many brand new programs still do not handle 4k sector drives correctly) Starting the partition at sector 63 is not aligned to the 4k flash boundaries.
If you use windows vista/7 to format a drive the partition will start at sector 2048 and is thus aligned correctly. One thing to note if installing windows 7 (clean) to a unpartitioned drive it will create a 100-200 meg hidden diagnostic partition at the beginning of the drive. This will cause the OS partition to be misaligned. In many cases you will not have a problem cloning or imaging an existing drive that uses a 2048 sector offset that has a single partition to an SSD with the correct 2048 offset and a single partition even if the software is not directly compatible with 4k sector drives. This is not a proven fact but in my and many others experiences it seems true.
Which clone/imaging/partitioning software works correctly for sure? I have no idea. Most likely any program will still have problems if the SSD has more than one partition. Even windows vista/7 can only create a single partition that is aligned correctly. Any additional partitions will not be aligned correctly. I have read some people have used a disk editor to correct the partition alignment of additional partitions after using windows vista/7 to partition the drive. There are also utilities that can fix the alignment of a drive with a single partition. WD drives come with this tool. Paragon also makes a tool that works on any brand drive.
The easy way to get around these problems is to do a clean install of windows 7 on a SSD that was formatted from within windows 7 itself. Using a single partition of course. If you can’t do this from within windows 7 you can use Diskpart. Diskpart is a command line utility that is included on the windows 7 install disk. The below commands are a quote from Tweakhound.com If you do not have a windows 7 install disk your back to doing it the hard way as above.
“Windows 7 Installation Advanced Drive Formatting
1 - Boot up from the Windows 7 installation disc.
2 - Choose Repair your computer.
3 - In the System Recovery Options screen, choose Use recovery tools… and click Next.
4 - Open the Command Prompt.
5 - Type diskpart and hit Enter.
6 - Type list disk . Find the disk you wish to install Windows 7 on. If you only have one disk then it will show as disk 0. If you have multiple disks find the drive you wish to install 7 on.
7 - Type select disk 0 (or use the number of the disk you wish to install Windows 7 on)(note - that is a zero)
8 - Type list partition. There shouldn’t be any.
9 - Type create partition primary.
10- Type select partition 1.
11- Type active.
12- Type format quick.
13- When finished reboot and begin your installation.”
Other thoughts. You should make sure your PC’s hard drive controller is in AHCI mode or can be switched to AHCI mode. This is a bios setting. This mode allows windows 7 to invoke the trim command. If your PC is in IDE mode you can’t just switch to AHCI mode. My pen is temporarily out of ink.
The best place I have found for info on SSD’s is the OCZ forums. Google trim/SSD/AHCI etc. for more info.
Good luck. If you have any more questions just ask.
Bill