Acer R7-571 upgrade cache drive to large SSD for boot drive and keep traditional HDD.

adessmith
adessmith Member Posts: 18

Tinkerer

Is it possible to replace the 24GB cache drive in the R7-571 with a larger SSD (say 128GB or 256GB) to use as a boot drive, and keep the traditional drive for other storage?

I've seen references to people "upgrading" to SSD, but do they normaly keep the 24GB cache drive and upgrade their traditional 500GB drive?
If it is possible to replace the 24GB cache drive, it seems silly to keep it and toss a perfectly good traditional drive. Seems there would not be much point in having the cache drive if your main drive is an SSD.

 

Best Answer

  • PenguinJim
    PenguinJim Member Posts: 72 Enthusiast WiFi Icon
    Answer ✓

    Yes, I put a 128GB Plextor M5M in my mSATA port. Make sure you create a recovery USB first, then open up the R7 and replace the 24GB drive with your new mSATA drive.

     

    Make sure your new SSD is mSATA, not regular SATA! Smiley Wink

     

    You can see an R7 being opened and where everything is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLWdiLxLoyI

Answers

  • PenguinJim
    PenguinJim Member Posts: 72 Enthusiast WiFi Icon
    Answer ✓

    Yes, I put a 128GB Plextor M5M in my mSATA port. Make sure you create a recovery USB first, then open up the R7 and replace the 24GB drive with your new mSATA drive.

     

    Make sure your new SSD is mSATA, not regular SATA! Smiley Wink

     

    You can see an R7 being opened and where everything is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLWdiLxLoyI

  • adessmith
    adessmith Member Posts: 18

    Tinkerer

    That is awesome.
    I've upgraded my wireless chip to a faster intel AC chip, and upgraded the ram to 12GB, so I am familiar with the process of opening this computer (I'm an IT guy by trade) but this is my first time cloning a drive in windows 8, so I'm not familiar with that process. I'm sure I can work my way through it though...

    Here is my plan:
    Move as much stuff as necesary to external storage so that my C partition will fit on the new drive.
    Remove the condusiv technologies expresscache software

    Create a recovery USB drive.
    Replace the 24GB ssd with the new larger one.
    Clone the main drive to the the new SSD.

    REMOVE the old 500GB (just to be safe)

    Run the OS recovery
    Make sure everything is working proplerly on the new SSD.
    Plug the old 500GB drive into a different computer to format it.
    Place it back in the R7.
    After that, at my leasure, I will likely uninstall some of the less demanding programs I use and reinstall them on the emplty 500GB drive, and move all my data and media over to that drive.

     

    I do have a couple of questions and concerns though:
    1) I've never used the windows 8 recovery process. That isnt going to want to blow out my windows install and all my programs and settings is it? I'd like to clone the drive first, then use the recovery to "repair" the instance of windows, keeping everything in tact. I JUST got all the software configured on this system the way I need, I'd hate to have to do all that over again.
    2) Any recomended program for cloning the drive? I have used some in the past that required the capacity of the new drive be the same size as the old (even if the capacity used was less). I WILL NOT be putting in a 500GB SSD (as nice as that would be). I'm torn between 128 and 256. I use a lot of adobe suite products (premiere, photoshop, lightroom, indesign, muse, dreamweaver, etc...), and would like to keep those programs on the SSD, so I'm afraid 128 will be too small.

     

    I'm an old dog and havent done a lot with windows 7, and nothing with windows 8. Most of my experience comes from the XP days and earlier. I'm really not that old, but havent been keeping up due to the company I work for being stuck in the stone ages. (windows server 2003, SQL 2005, and XP based workstations). I still dont have a good handle on everything going on behind the scenes with windows 8.

     

  • adessmith
    adessmith Member Posts: 18

    Tinkerer

    Haha.... I was JUST reading that same lifehacker guide before I saw your reply.
    So that worked fine for you with no issues?

     

    So far I've been really pleased with the performance of my R7, BUT there are some things that could be faster.
    My boot time increased quite a bit after upgrading to 8.1, and loading some of the adobe apps (like premiere pro) are a little sluggish. I really like the idea of the SSD increasing battery life also.

     

    What has been your experience? Was it worth it? Did you notice an incredible performance improvement?

  • adessmith
    adessmith Member Posts: 18

    Tinkerer

    For what it's worth, I'm seriously considering a samsung EVO drive. I've heard some people which highly reccomend those.

  • PenguinJim
    PenguinJim Member Posts: 72 Enthusiast WiFi Icon

    My R7-571G didn't have a cache drive, but I threw in my M5M as soon as possible. I took a lot longer to get it all going than I needed to, because at one point I switched off UEFI in the BIOS for a laugh (don't do that!). I hadn't upgraded to 8.1 before installation, but the R7's super-speedy at loading now, to the point where I can't tell if I've just switched it on from power-off, awoken it from sleep, or the screen had just switched off to save power. It's always a couple of seconds.

     

    I hadn't paid too much attention, but I *think* going from Win8 to 8.1 freed up about 7GB of space..? That's from "freshly-cloned Win8" space to "Win8.1's finished installing" space, rather than it simply deleting its own download files afterwards. I could be wrong.

     

    I also took out the 750GB HDD that came in mine. Battery life is well over five hours of Chromey MSOfficey and a bit of gamey use and there's no sluggishness or waiting-for-spin-up pauses or HDD noises. Surprisingly, 128GB has been enough for me over the past two months, but I've got my wife's old 60GB SSD sat on my desk ready to be installed if I need more.

     

    Edit: the Samsung EVOs look very nice (they weren't out here in the first week of January, when I got mine). You should shortlist a couple of drives and look for bargains on them!

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