How do you restore when there is both a SSD and SATA drive?
How do you restore when there is both a SSD and SATA drive?
I have a Dell XPS 8700 Special Edition computer running Windows 8.1. Of the XPS 8700's only the Special Edition has an SSD and a SATA drive, all others have only the SATA drive. Making a True Image Disk backups of both SSD and SATA drives works well. But restore using the rescue disk is a disaster. In my latest problem using True Image 2014 the restored images resulted in loss of use of the SDD and made the computer slow to a crawl. I discussed this with a person very familiar with Acronis true Image and he said that it is possible to do a correct restore with my computer, but it is so complicated that I probably would have to pay to have an expert do it.
How is this restore done and is there any effort being made to upgrade True Image so that it can easily restore on a computer that uses a 256 GB SSD feeding a 2 TB SATA Drive?
At the present time I will have to reinstall the factory version of Windows 8.1 and will then have to re-install all my software and data. Dell has had to replace three motherboards because of damage to my computer caused by using True Image 2014. Needless to say, after many years of using Acronis TI, I will not do this any longer until these problems with their software are resolved.
The drives are MBR. Tried it with UEFI and then again after new motherboard with Legacy, both times a disaster. Dell decided to install new motherboards because after using TU it was not possible to access the bios. After the present problem, Dell insisted that they install a third motherboard and then re-install the factory operating system they sent me on a USB drive. As I understand it, these are proprietary motherboards. These have all been replaced under warranty.
Forgot to answer one of your questions. These are separately lettered drives.
You say that your machine has a 256GB SSD and a 2TB SATA drive. Are you sure about this? I looked up the specs on your machine and they say it comes equipped with a 32GB SSD and a 2TB SATA disk. This arrangement I can understand. Using both types of drives and the latest Intel Matrix Storage drivers it is possible to create a Hybrid type drive arrangement in which the 2 drives are setup in a RAID arrangement of sorts. 32GB drives are the most popular for this arrangement as performance gains fall off above 64GB.
The person you discussed this with familiar to ATI is correct in the procedure to restore being complicated and depending on your skill level may not be achievable by the user.
No, the drive sizes I listed are correct. However, I thank you for validating the difficulty in doing a restore with an SSD. I do not believe TI will be of much use to me in the future.
No, the drive sizes I listed are correct. However, I thank you for validating the difficulty in doing a restore with an SSD. I do not believe TI will be of much use to me in the future.
It's not an SSD that's the problem; it's the two physically separate drives in a hybrid arrangement.
If your computer has Intel Smart Response technology, it is probably set up to use the SSD as a caching mechanism. You can reconfigure your system so that you put it on the normal disk, and then use the SSD only for caching.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/248828/how_to_setup_intel_smart_response…
You can then backup your main disk normally. When you restore, you can disable this caching in the BIOS, and restore to the disk. You can then turn caching back on, and the cache will rebuild itself on the SSD.