Impressions - Upgrading Asus N56VZ Laptop with a Second Hard Drive

What is that?

1. I haven't been using the BluRay drive that came in my now 4-months-old laptop (reviewed here).
2. By chance I found topics in Asus User Forums speaking of HDD caddies, which replace the optical drive with a housing for a second hard drive.
3. Knowing that the laptop has potential for performance improvement ( SATA 3, Core i7, etc. ), I decided it was about time to invest into SSD.
4. The advice I got was to put the SSD in the place of the main 1 TB HDD and place the old HDD in the caddy. The reason: the caddy controller or a lower speed bus might cripple performance, which would kill SSD performance.

Components:

1. The laptop, obviously, with the correct screw drives.
2. Another PC/ tablet/ smartphone with internet connectivity to research or watch a video while on the job. This is ignorable if you do enough preparation and watch the videos on YouTube.
3. HDD Caddy: mine is from HDDCaddy.eu. However you can get it cheaper from eBay. I went for the more expensive one because it mentions that it has SATA 3 support.
4. ADATA XPG SX9 128 GB SSD. There are very few alternatives here in Cairo, this model had nice reviews during fall 2012, which makes it a good option. Uses a Sandforce controller if you care about that.
5. External Storage for backing up data

How I did it - the fool-proof, brute force way:

1. Backup everything on the original 1 TB to external storage.
2. Remove the original storage, install SSD in its place.
3. Install the original storage in the HDD caddy and put it in place.
4. During Windows installation, I completely formatted the 1 TB HDD, to move boot settings to the SSD and be sure about it.
5. Finish install Windows in 3 minutes; first noticeable performance gain
6. Install Asus drivers, Firefox and the usual list of tools.
7. Using the Storage Management tool available in Windows, I partitioned the HDD into 3 partitions: page file, media & executables. 

2 tips during partitioning:

1. Page file should be 1-1.5 times the amount of RAM you have. 
2. I still have the virus-phobia that would put me in a situation that would force me to format the partition that holds all the executables, so at least I would save my precious media, documents.

 Results:

1. Windows boots in less than 30 seconds from power off to Welcome screen. You barely see the Windows logo.
2.  Games placed on the SSD load way faster. So far I am very happy with the much faster processing of Civilization 5's turns.
3. Firefox start up is  seeing a very satisfying boost (2 add-ons installed plus Flash, Java, etc.)
4. Excessive heat! An extra hot blast of heat comes out of the left side of the machine. This makes me think it's better to limit gaming sessions to 45-60 minutes at a time only until things cool down again. After all, this machine is not a premium desktop replacement.
5. A welcome bi-product: a de-bloated system; all the pre-installed freeware that I barely find useful was removed, improving resource utilization. However there is a price for this if done the way I did it, as in the last section of this guide.

A general tip:

This is not specific to this upgrade, but during formatting the original 1 TB HDD that contained the recovery partition of Asus, the recovery partition was lost. I sort of lost access to the Windows copy that was pre-installed on the machine and I need to find a way to regain hold of it.