Will Acronis write to solid state drive?

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by everydayearthling, Nov 5, 2008.

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  1. everydayearthling

    everydayearthling Registered Member

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    I searched to see if this has been asked before but didn't find anything.

    I currently use Acronis True Image Home 11. I'm seriously thinking about getting a Solid State Drive in the not too distant future. I realize the SSD will more than likely be smaller than my current hard drive and I'll do what I need to do to work around that.

    However, before I deal with that issue my first question is if I make a full image of my current hard drive the same size as the new SSD will Acronis True Image Home 11 write this image to a SSD?

    I'm using Win XP Pro.

    Thanks for any advice.

    Everyday Earthling
     
  2. PBlais

    PBlais Registered Member

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    An SSD is going to appear as an SATA II disk drive. The way it works is to fool the system into thinking it is a real hard drive. It should do that quite well. You can get a 128 GB drive for under $400. For half that money you can get a 1 TB real disk drive and make 9 times as many backups. Either way it should work.

    So will it work? I should think so but it's not the best economical thing to do. Given the price of the software it's even more of an economic decision. The SSD won't back up any faster than the real hard drive can transfer the data to it. So backing up to a real hard drive would be as fast as an SSD., I doubt you can justify the SSD as a backup device any other way than bragging rights.
     
  3. bodgy

    bodgy Registered Member

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    I don't think there will be a problem writing to a SSD as PBlais says above, I do wonder about making an image from one though.

    As SSD's have load leveling firmware, I wonder if this would cause TI to always image the complete drive when performing an incremental image, as load levelling might well look to TI like defragging.

    Colin
     
  4. 357mag

    357mag Registered Member

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    I read the solid state drives that are currently available are slow.
     
  5. NumLock

    NumLock Registered Member

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    If you want better performance on a desktop; I suggest getting a 10,000rpm HD instead of a SSD. SSD's strengths attracts mobile users more than normal desktops since there are no 10,000rpm mobile drives.

    SSDs for windows and program files. Normal HDDs for your data.

    I have a feeling ATI will have problems with SSDs since its a technology quite different from normal HDs. Plus; the chance that the recovery media will detect the SSD upon offline restoration is very low.
     
  6. everydayearthling

    everydayearthling Registered Member

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    PBlais,
    Please forgive me. I didn't explain myself very well. My bad. I won't be using the SSD as a backup device. I would like to image my current hard drive to the SSD to use it for the OS and a few programs. I would use the current hard drive for data only. I would use a separate external hard drive for backups. In other words, I would like to move my entire OS and programs off the old hard drive and onto the SSD.

    I've been advised to get a SSD to increase the drop-down rate with Dragon Natually Speaking with closed captioning and CART, for which I'm currently in training. Otherwise, Dragon drops in large paragraph chunks, which is too hard for deaf or hard of hearing people to read.

    If I installed it in my computer and did not use it as an external backup drive, would I have to fool the computer into thinking it was a "real hard drive" and if so how would I do that?

    Everyday Earthling
     
  7. everydayearthling

    everydayearthling Registered Member

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    Numlock,
    I'll ask my trainer about the 10,000rpm HD to see if that's an option for my desktop. I'll need something for my laptop too so I'm still interested in the SSD for OS and programs and a regular hard drive in desktop for data and an external drive for laptop for data.

    I was afraid that someone would say ATI will have problems with SSD. Do you think just moving my OS and programs to it would be a problem since I won't be using the SSD as a backup device but for use in the laptop?

    Everyday Earthling
     
  8. everydayearthling

    everydayearthling Registered Member

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    Colin,

    If making an image from an SSD won't work then I assume I won't ever be able to back up the SSD. I could have to save the original hard drive I moved from in case of failure to reimage to another SDD. That should work fine to a point. I wouldn't have program updates backed up though. I'll be putting data on a regular drive so backing that up won't be an issue.

    I don't do incremental images. It always made me too nervous I would screw something up. I've always backed up the whole hard drive if needed and did just data backups separately once a week in a different location. So ATI not doing incremental backups for an SSD isn't a big issue to me.

    Everyday Earthling
     
  9. everydayearthling

    everydayearthling Registered Member

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    I'm no expert, by any means, but that's not what I've read recently.

    Everyday Earthling
     
  10. PBlais

    PBlais Registered Member

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    Speed wise they should be fine. If you want speed the 10,000 rpm drives are flat out faster. I'm seeing the only advantage to the SSD's is power in return for less storage. The specs I saw on NewEgg for the largest drive they have in stock are pretty fast so I think speed might not be an issue and since they install as an internal SATA device TI should treat it like any drive. I think you could do what you want but I think your expectations may not be exceeded.

    For the same exact money you could set up a big 10K hard drive and get a 1TB backup drive. One fast O/S disk and a second data disk then a large dedicated backup disk. Splitting the O/S and data I like a lot. The O/S disk gets beat up all day and would be the one most voted to fail first. Have the other two with lighter duty just makes it a better case for not losing them.

    If speed is an issue buy a faster horse and for better backup get a bigger barn.
     
  11. everydayearthling

    everydayearthling Registered Member

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    Great ideas!

    Thanks,
    Everyday Earthling
     
  12. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello all,

    Thank you for using Acronis True Image

    I should add, that formally Acronis True Image (Home and Corporate lines) doesn't support Solid State drives. The compatibility may be implemented for the future builds or versions of Acronis software.

    Thank you.

    __

    Oleg Lee
     
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