Computer can't assign letter to crucial ssd

[glad rag]

After reading up on the internet on how initialize and format a brand new ssd, i went through with the format process and afterwards i am left with this,

http://i.imgur.com/sc2bFhZ.png

The ssd is shown as disk 0 and primary partition after attempting to format it, but it is not shown under the list of hard drives above with the letter i chose to assign to it1, right clicking on disk 0 brings up the following-

http://i59.tinypic.com/2hn0q9w.jpg

But trying to click "Change drive letter and paths" brings up an error.

Any advice on how to fix this?

[mad_jock]

it looks as if its mounted but not formatted yet.

Once you have formatted it that will then allow a drive letter assigned.

But......

Are you trying to turn it into your system disk using the current OS?

If so there should have been some software came with the drive to clone the system part of you disk over onto the SSD.

I have a Samsung and the software provided looked after everything for me.

Just plugged it in and told it what I wanted. Shut down swapped the disks about so I had the new boot disk where I wanted it and fired it up. Optimised it for max life span and haven't touched it since.

[glad rag]

I am trying to turn it into a system disc using my current os yes, however no software came with the ssd. Do i need to install some kind of software?

[mad_jock]

If you go to the ssd manufactures website there will be.

The should have been a cd with it with managment software as well

[Keef]

Actually, Disk 1 looks odd to me, too. It's reporting a drive size, then two partitions that add to more than the driv4e size.

Here's how mine appears in the same screen:

http://jillings.org/aviation/drives.jpg

I suspect you do need the special software to "clone" the drive. I don't know what Crucial use - mine is an Intel which came with all the necessary on a CDROM. A phone call to Crucial might help.

There were two snags in changing to SSD that took me a while to fix:
1. The Intel software can only clone a boot partition that is the same size or smaller than the SSD. I had to move stuff off the previous boot drive and get it down to size.
2. The Intel drive "timed out" looking for the motherboard OS before the OS went looking for a boot drive. I made a "delay unit" that waited one second after power up of the PC before putting power on the SSD.

The other lesser problem is that some software (Apple's stuff is a prime offender) does an awful lot of "churning" of the boot drive (drive C). I was worried that would wear out the SSD prematurely, so did some "redirecting" of Apple and other stuff to a conventional drive partition.

[Saab Dastard]

Disk 1 looks odd to me, too. It's reporting a drive size, then two partitions that add to more than the driv4e size.

No, it's kosher - one partition is in MB, the other in GB, the 9MB discrepancy is just a rounding up or down somewhere.

Keef, the difference in your system is that your Disk 2 has no System Reserved partition -the System partition is on the C: drive instead, which is the exception rather than the norm for a Vista / Win 7 installation.

SD

[Loose rivets]

I was worried that would wear out the SSD prematurely,

Keef, I realize you're not using the term literally, although I've heard of SSDs failing quite early in life. Are they subject to a reduced life span when worked hard? An open question, obviously.

I often see my hard drive busy while the computer is doing little but monitoring Skype and it seems it gets very little rest. It always seems to me to be and odd way to treat an electromechanical device and I would have thought going solid state on the operating system would have been the answer to this. Since they are expensive, and the integrity of one's system could be vitally important, is it a bad idea to have SSD at the front end?

[le Pingouin]

"Wear" is actually the correct term. The flash cells that make up an SSD can only be written a limited number of times so they do "wear". For cheaper consumer grade SSDs it's around 1000 cycles. "Wear levelling" is an important feature - different cells are written to spread the wear more evenly, extending the life of the drive.

AnandTech | Samsung SSD 840: Testing the Endurance of TLC NAND (http://www.anandtech.com/show/6459/samsung-ssd-840-testing-the-endurance-of-tlc-nand)

[mad_jock]

crucial do have software from my brief search on the subject.

And yes SSD's do wear which is why sometimes its better to put your cache on a normal drive and save your SSD for fewer rights.

If you have loads of ram you can just create a ram disk for cache.

[glad rag]

WIP, Crucial software sourced; you have to buy an "installation kit" to get the software on disk. Having delved into this further it may actually be a bit of a minefield.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/284280-32-windows-install-clone#

Which it Shouldn't Be of course. :*

[glad rag]

Right am giving this a miss for a couple of days, then will revisit and if it still won't integrate into the system then it's going back.

"life's too short" etc springs to mind..

In fact Crucial may well be shooting themselves in the foot here, from a commercial standpoint, apparently other vendors offerings are a lot more user friendly:*

[Booglebox]

Modern SSDs, under reasonable HDD-like use, are effectively immune to wear - especially with TRIM enabled (by default in all modern OSes).
The SSD Endurance Experiment: Casualties on the way to a petabyte - The Tech Report - Page 1 (http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte)

[mad_jock]

get a Samsung evo it worked a treat for me.

And continues to as well.

[Shaman]

Thanks for the link Booglebox - v interesting...

[mixture]

and the integrity of one's system could be vitally important, is it a bad idea to have SSD at the front end?

Non-SSD hard drives fail at any time too, other stuff can happen to your PC too that will affect its integrity.

So...... just be a good boy and do your BACKUPS like you know you should and stop fretting about SSD vs non-SSD boot disks for heavens sake !