How to Boot From a Solid State Drive

Solid state drives, also known as SSDs, are drives that do not use any moving parts in the drive. Instead of a hard drive platter spinning disks to get to a specific part of the drive, the SSD accesses it directly from the magnetic storage. SSDs have higher read speeds than many platter-based hard drives, although certain write patterns are slower in speed. You can boot directly from the SSD and use it as your primary drive after you have installed an operating system on the drive.

Things You'll Need

• Operating system disk

Instructions

1. Insert your operating system installation disk into your computer. Restart your computer and press any key on the keyboard when prompted during boot up to start the DVD. Follow the on-screen instructions, choosing to install Windows on the solid state drive.

2. Restart your computer once the installation is completely finished. Watch the screen for a message that specifies the key you need to hit to enter your computer's basic input and output system. The keys vary between manufacturers and BIOS versions, but common keys are "Del," the function keys and "Esc."

3. Use your arrow keys to navigate around the BIOS menus. Each BIOS version has its own setup, but you need to either select the boot order, boot options or advanced option menus and press "Enter."

4. Change the first boot device to the SSD. Press "F10" to save and exit. Your computer will now use the SSD as your first boot device.

References

• Help Desk Geek: How to change the boot sequence in the BIOS
• Intel: Buying an SSD - What Should You Be Looking For?