hard drive - Modifications about ssd in windows 7

I have a 7-years old HP Pavilion dv7 with the following specs:
- Intel Centrino2 (Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9400 @2.53GHz)
- 8 GHz Ram
- 2 HDDs (Hitachi HTS543225L9A300 ATA Device 250 GBytes each one)
- OS: Windows 7 64bit Ultimate.

Now i've decided to buy the Samsung 850 Evo (250 GBytes) SSD in order to switch my C drive with that one and use the old HDD as a third hard disc in my optical drive's slot.
After reading many posts i realised that i have to either do a clean install of my Windows 7 or clone my C to the SSD in order to achieve the change (which i prefer to do due to the many programs i have installed).

However, things became somehow blur according to which modifications one has to do in his Bios and OS (like enabling or not ACHI, moving Paging from C - ssd now - to another Hard drive, enabling Trim, disabling or not restore points plus hybernating plus.. etc )in order to have his ssd run smoothly and thus achieving the best performance while avoiding shrinking his SSD's life and capacity.

So i am kindly aksing whether one of the experienced members of this forum could provide a step by step guide that one should follow when switching his old HDD with a new SSD

Answer

If the machine is intended for general use then my recommendation would be to swap the C: HDD for SSD, and replacing the other 250GB HDD with bigger drive. They're now so cheap it's really a no-brainer. Clone the C: drive.

Based on my own experiences - I initially had a 250GB SSD in HD bay and another 1TB HDD in optical bay adapter. It actually slowed me down, as a lot of stuff had to be installed on slow HDD. Also, experienced intermittent disconnecting of the HDD... As I wanted to be able to swap HDD for DVD to do occasional burning bay adapter wasn't screwed in place. Thus sometimes had an HDD access error. Very annoying.
I'm now on 512GB SSD (mSata) and 1TB HDD (HDD bay) and it's perfect.

Don't worry about the (by now old and proved wrong) ideas about placing Swap on another drive etc. to protect SSD - My Evo850, after a less than a year totaled 5TB of total writes (out of guaranteed 1000TB and practical for 850EVO 2000TB), with swap, hiberfil and a lot of big games on it. I would call it medium-heavy use of my SSD (games, software dev, database dev, streaming, cloud etc)...
Only thing to make sure is that TRIM is enabled. But as it's actually OS functionality, anything from and including Windows 7 will have that built-in.

Do not give in to bad advice on placing the system files not on SSD (swap, hibernation file etc.) - this will actually not use greatest SSD advantages and would defeat the whole purpose of getting it. Your system is probably SATA II, which will mean SSD will not be used to max potential. Also, you have (probably) 8GB of RAM, which is good. On the whole you'll see about 2-3 times better performance if you'll place swap file on the SSD (measured that with PassMark on Dell E6400 with very similar specs to your HP).

Samsung drives' performance is dependent on overprovisioning (10% is considered minimum), so if you'll leave at least that much you will always be at the peak performance. After a while I disabled RAM caching - several BSODs corrupted Windows installation. With this I traded some performance improvement for much better data integrity. Do not disable TRIM.

That's about it.

EDIT.

Replacing HDD with SSD Quick tour.

When installing SSD, the computer need to meet certain requirements for optimum performance:

1. AHCI must be enabled in the system. This is a bit tricky, because if we are cloning the SSD and system was set up as non-AHCI, Windows will not recognize the drive and fail to boot. But fix for that is very easy and, anyway, most computers for quite a while are set up as AHCI by default. Be sure to activate AHCI in Windows BEFORE enabling it in BIOS, else you won't be able to boot.




2. The partitions created on the SSD - be it either fresh install or cloning - cannot use all available space. HOWEVER, some manufacturers do that as a default, so it needs to be checked. Samsung does not overprovision drives, so it needs to be set up. So, for example, if SSD is a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB then the partition should be ~224000MB. Again, if system is cloned from same size HDD after cloning parititon(s) need to be shrunk. This, again is very easy to do in Windows 7 and later.




3. After booting to cloned SSD be sure to check if TRIM is enabled. Windows 7 or later have this enabled by default, but all bets are off when cloning and not doing fresh install.




4. Some systems will come with several possible SATA Operation (or something to that effect) options in BIOS like IDE, AHCI, ISRT, IRST, RAID etc. For most users AHCI when switching to SSD is enough. Those options give advanced functionalities not used in home or personal computer. RAID-0, which you specifically ask about is a way to speed up computer when more than one physical drive is available in the computer (and the more disks there are, the faster system will be). Speeding up is achieved by splitting the data to be written into number of parts equal to the number of disks. The OS will see all of those disks as one. The downside if this option is in case of drive failure (just one out of the number of disks) all data is lost. It is recommended to do very frequent backups. You do not need RAID 0.