Upgrading PC Storage

Current model hard drives are a little bit faster than drives from a few years ago.
SSD's have reached the point where they saturate a SATA III port. The difference between an SSD and a hard drive is drastic. but they also cost a lot more per Gb. They have dropped significantly over the years. It wasn't all that long ago that a top end 256Gb SSD was $400. Today you can buy a 1Tb SSD for that. But a 2Tb hard drive is quite a bit cheaper than that...

Western Digital BLACK SERIES 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
$119.70 FREE $119.70 Newegg

So what a lot of people like to do is to buy a 128Mb or 256Mb SSD, install Windows on it, put the software you use regularly on it, but tell everything to store its data on the hard drive. Then the system boots a lot faster, programs load faster, and the data goes to the hard drive so your SSD doesn't fill up.

Samsung 850 Pro Series 128GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
$104.89 $104.89 OutletPC

Samsung 850 Pro Series 256GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
$157.89 $157.89 OutletPC

So those are some options. The number of choices out there is almost unlimited. So decide what you want to do, and then be happy with what you decided to go with. BTW, I used pcpartpicker.com to get the product info listed above.

Most similar sized SSD's are priced in a somewhat narrow range. However, there are a few things we have discovered over the years that affect SSD's which are rarely listed on the spec sheet.

One of those is that the companies that manufacture the chips take the cream of the crop for themselves, and sell off the rest of the chips to all the smaller companies that do not have multi-billion dollar fabs to produce their own.

The next thing is that only tiny number of companies can produce their own controller chips. These controllers literally control everything that's going on inside the SSD. Some controllers use a fair amount of power, and others just barely sip it, when idle. And since SSD's in the consumer space tend to spend the vast majority of their time doing nothing, idle power consumption is the important number for us.

I believe that Samsung is the only company that can produce every part that is used in building an SSD in their own factories. And over the years, they have produced very reliable SSD units. The units I listed for you, have 10 year warranties. Most SSD's have a 3 year warranty, and a few have a 5 year warranty.

In the system I built, I chose to install a 1Tb Samsung SSD, and not to have a hard drive at all. Its been a year now, and I love this drive.

Even the mighty Intel uses other companies controllers in their SSD's.

So I recommend Samsung SSD's. Seems lots of others here do as well.

Now the question about installing steam on the SSD and having games installed on another drive, yes. You can do that with hard drives, and you can do the exact same things a hard drive does with an SSD.

Prices can and do change on a daily basis. In addition, there are multiple models of SSD's, even from the same company. The first drive below was $104.89 the other day

Samsung 850 Pro Series 128GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
$99.99 $99.99 Amazon

The second drive I originally posted the other day actually dropped to $114 2 days ago, but its back to where it started now.

And this these 2 drives are using a triple cell storage technology instead of double cell used on the above drives.

Samsung 850 EVO-Series 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
$69.75 $69.75 OutletPC

Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
$117.88 $117.88 OutletPC

Its all just food for thought. If you prefer the Intel SSD, its a good unit too.

Yeah, slower... but when you are running as fast as a SSD does, the only way you would probably know the triple cell tech was slower if you used a benchmark program. The SSD I have (Samsung 840 EVO 1TB) is triple cell, and it just screams, or at least I think it does.

I'm glad you made your choices, and both of them should prove to be excellent for you.

You have a great week now!!

I would remove the current drives that you have, and just plug in the new SSD and install windows on it. That will assure that you (or windows) do not accidently do something to your data. Once you have windows installed on the SSD, go into the BIOS, and setup boot order to CD/DVD, then your new SSD, and leave the other drives off of that list. That will make sure that the BIOS accesses the new SSD and not the older drives.

Then reattach the older drives and copy what you want moved to where you want it moved to. I would move everything else any old copies of Windows directories. Simplest way it to open up explorer, press CTRL-A to select everything, and then while holding SHIFT down, click on the Windows folder to deselect it. I would do this before going to bed, and just let it do its thing during the night, as it will take time. Alternatively, there are disk cloning programs out there that speed things up, but I have never used any of them. I seem to have more time than I have money... <shrug>

The software that you use will most likely need to be reinstalled after you have installed Windows on the new SSD. This is because the registry will be recreated during the install, and the entries that each program adds will no longer be in it.

Hmmm... Its probably going to require that you have a bootable disk with windows on it that it can see. And I do not know that it can do a full install. I have a funny feeling it is no more than what it says it is. Microsoft has gotten pretty paranoid about people making unauthorized copies of windows, and they have pretty much stopped giving out a copy to OEM buyers, and they seem to prefer selling you a digital copy. I prefer a nice shiny disk that I can use more than once, so I paid extra.

You will need to see what options to have when you boot from that recovery disk. If it tells you it needs to see a windows boot disk, then you will need to attach that drive at a minimum. I think I would attach the old boot drive and the new SSD and see if it would allow verification of the windows registration on the old disk, but still allow you to install windows to the new SSD. If that doesn't work, I'm not sure what to tell you. I'm sure someone here would know. But somehow there has to be a way to do this.

I've done some reading. If you can get it to a point where it will accept you telling it to format and install on the SSD, from what I see on the Microsoft site, it should be able to complete that task, even with a recovery disk. Just try it. See what it does. If it doesn't want to do what you want to do, I'll dig some more to see if I can find more info that would be useful. I was somewhat restricted in what I wanted to find out when I clicked a link to Microsoft Support, and was told

We're unable to complete your request
Microsoft account is experiencing technical problems. Please try again later.

I had to chuckle. I guess having 20,000 programmers sometimes isn't the solution either... LOL