Mistake of Buying an SSD

[Termater]

Yes I did make the mistake of buying an SSD. Now hold the comments, hear me out.

Having had my pc for about two years, going from an fx-8320 to a i5 4690k @ 4.5ghz. A Radeon 6670 to a gtx 780.

Numerous case upgrades, ram, motherboard, graphics card upgrades. You name it I changed it, except for the hard drive. A 1tb hard drive, holding videos and games. Modded tricked out games like Skyrim with hours of settings and tweaks and hundreds of gameplay hours on all my games. All on one hard drive.

So I bought an SSD to improve my responsiveness and boot time. But apparently there is NO WAY to play your old games on your old HDD on your SSD. Yes I can reinstall like one or two games before I run out of space. But my internet isn't good enough, and what about all my save games and numerous programs?

Alas it seems I'm dang out of luck. Unless there is anyone out there that knows of a way I can run my programs off of the hard drive, booting from the SSD.

If no one does it looks like I'm returning it and starting the saving up process for a 960gb ssd and copying the entire hard drive over.

[Enderman]

wait, so you bought an ssd without buying enough space for your games?

[slightlyjaded]

 

Okay I'm going to make the assumption you're running something like steam. This is steam specific, but I'd assume that some of the others work the same.

 

Stick steam on your boot drive. Tell it to download and install the game. When it asks where to install it, direct it to the folder on your old hard drive, rinse and repeat.

Steam always checks to see which files it needs to download before it does so. When it sees a full install, it shrugs it's shoulder's goes "okay" and moves on.

[Misanthrope]

Yes because using the SSD automatically sets your HDD on fire rendering you unable to keep using it.  :rolleyes:

[W-L]

-SNIP-

 

A lot fo people run their games off their HDD and have their system boot from the SSD. You just need to remap the location of your games and large storage files to the HDD instead of the SDD and your set, only real difference between and SSD for gaming and HDD is load times.

[Termater]

wait, so you bought an ssd without buying enough space for your games?

This is true, I thought you could simply use your old applications. But apparently that would be too easy

[QueenDemetria]

Alas it seems I'm dang out of luck. Unless there is anyone out there that knows of a way I can run my programs off of the hard drive, booting from the SSD.

You can boot from your SSD and have Steam(and any other program) installed on your HDD. For Steam sine I assume you already have it installed on your HDD, just launch steam.exe. For installing applications, install them to your HDD(probably D drive).

[Termater]

A lot fo people run their games off their HDD and have their system boot from the SSD. You just need to remap the location of your games and large storage files to the HDD instead of the SDD and your set, only real difference between and SSD for gaming and HDD is load times.

Well how would an individual do so?

[GoodN1ght]

Yes I did make the mistake of buying an SSD. Now hold the comments, hear me out.

Having had my pc for about two years, going from an fx-8320 to a i5 4690k @ 4.5ghz. A Radeon 6670 to a gtx 780.

Numerous case upgrades, ram, motherboard, graphics card upgrades. You name it I changed it, except for the hard drive. A 1tb hard drive, holding videos and games. Modded tricked out games like Skyrim with hours of settings and tweaks and hundreds of gameplay hours on all my games. All on one hard drive.

So I bought an SSD to improve my responsiveness and boot time. But apparently there is NO WAY to play your old games on your old HDD on your SSD. Yes I can reinstall like one or two games before I run out of space. But my internet isn't good enough, and what about all my save games and numerous programs?

Alas it seems I'm dang out of luck. Unless there is anyone out there that knows of a way I can run my programs off of the hard drive, booting from the SSD.

If no one does it looks like I'm returning it and starting the saving up process for a 960gb ssd and copying the entire hard drive over.

That's odd because I transfered NBA 2K15 from my SSD to HDD back and forth a couple of times and nothing happened. (I mean it worked flawlessly)

[CalebTheEternal]

Yes I did make the mistake of buying an SSD. Now hold the comments, hear me out.

Having had my pc for about two years, going from an fx-8320 to a i5 4690k @ 4.5ghz. A Radeon 6670 to a gtx 780.

Numerous case upgrades, ram, motherboard, graphics card upgrades. You name it I changed it, except for the hard drive. A 1tb hard drive, holding videos and games. Modded tricked out games like Skyrim with hours of settings and tweaks and hundreds of gameplay hours on all my games. All on one hard drive.

So I bought an SSD to improve my responsiveness and boot time. But apparently there is NO WAY to play your old games on your old HDD on your SSD. Yes I can reinstall like one or two games before I run out of space. But my internet isn't good enough, and what about all my save games and numerous programs?

Alas it seems I'm dang out of luck. Unless there is anyone out there that knows of a way I can run my programs off of the hard drive, booting from the SSD.

If no one does it looks like I'm returning it and starting the saving up process for a 960gb ssd and copying the entire hard drive over.

Just move them over to the SSD? Not hard?

[Termater]

Just move them over to the SSD? Not hard?

Well you have to reinstall all the programs onto the SSD. And when your SSD is only 120gb and your programs are 700+ gb ... Well you get the picture

[W-L]

Well how would an individual do so?

 

For your main stuff like photos movies keep it on the HDD in a separate folder or location of your choice. For things like steam and games, you will need to set the default download location to a folder inside of the HDD instead of the SSD. Other ways of saving space are remapping documents folders and other things windows natively defaults to the C\: drive(SSD) over into the HDD.

[CalebTheEternal]

Well you have to reinstall all the programs onto the SSD. And when your SSD is only 120gb and your programs are 700+ gb ... Well you get the picture

Honestly you just seem lazy... Get more SSD then? That's what I did... Just pick up 3 more like me. Or get 8 and do RAID.

[Termater]

For your main stuff like photos movies keep it on the HDD in a separate folder or location of your choice. For things like steam and games, you will need to set the default download location to a folder inside of the HDD instead of the SSD. Other ways of saving space are remapping documents folders and other things windows natively defaults to the C\: drive(SSD) over into the HDD.

Okay so for steam this can work because it will simply fix itself, checking off the games because they're already downloaded. But what about.. Say a Non Steam game? Not origin either, how does one go about playing one of those off the HDD (redownloading isn't an option considering my download speed is 80KBS)

[Wingfan]

this thread is giving me a headache.......you bought a 120GB SSD and expected to put 1TB of 'stuff' on it?

[W-L]

Okay so for steam this can work because it will simply fix itself, checking off the games because they're already downloaded. But what about.. Say a Non Steam game? Not origin either, how does one go about playing one of those off the HDD (redownloading isn't an option considering my download speed is 80KBS)

 

:mellow: Time for a new ISP....

 

Haha but for older games or straight games that don't use a launcher like steam, Uplay, etc.. once it's inside the HDD you can search for the game's application (.exe) file and create a shortcut icon to your desktop for example or other locations to where you want to have all your games collected.

[Termater]

this thread is giving me a headache.......you bought a 120GB SSD and expected to put 1TB of 'stuff' on it?

I bought a 120gb SSD expecting to install windows on it, improving boot times and responsiveness, then still access the programs and games from my old HDD, (access and use)

[TheGeeker]

If your like me you NEED a 2tb HDD and already filled ur ssd with junk because you forgot to change the download locations and installers. SO yea my ssd is kinda uselessish now. 

[RedOwen1177]

A lot fo people run their games off their HDD and have their system boot from the SSD. You just need to remap the location of your games and large storage files to the HDD instead of the SDD and your set, only real difference between and SSD for gaming and HDD is load times.

This works great, fast boot up, and mass storage.

[dalekphalm]

I bought a 120gb SSD expecting to install windows on it, improving boot times and responsiveness, then still access the programs and games from my old HDD, (access and use)

Just to give you a heads up - any time Windows needs to access the HDD, you'll lose that "responsiveness" - in particular, when accessing programs and documents on there.

 

The HDD is totally suited for mass storage of large docs (pictures, videos, games, etc), but a program will "feel" much faster and snappier if installed on the SSD.

 

My suggestion, aside from everything else mentioned above, is to reinstall your most frequently used programs onto the SSD.

 

Keep the games on the HDD - as aside from loading times, most* games will see no actual ingame performance benefit.

 

*Most but not all. Open world games and MMO`s, among a few others, can sometimes have increased performance from running off an SSD - though the performance difference is often still fairly minimal.

[Cheddle]

Yes I did make the mistake of buying an SSD. Now hold the comments, hear me out.

Having had my pc for about two years, going from an fx-8320 to a i5 4690k @ 4.5ghz. A Radeon 6670 to a gtx 780.

Numerous case upgrades, ram, motherboard, graphics card upgrades. You name it I changed it, except for the hard drive. A 1tb hard drive, holding videos and games. Modded tricked out games like Skyrim with hours of settings and tweaks and hundreds of gameplay hours on all my games. All on one hard drive.

So I bought an SSD to improve my responsiveness and boot time. But apparently there is NO WAY to play your old games on your old HDD on your SSD. Yes I can reinstall like one or two games before I run out of space. But my internet isn't good enough, and what about all my save games and numerous programs?

Alas it seems I'm dang out of luck. Unless there is anyone out there that knows of a way I can run my programs off of the hard drive, booting from the SSD.

If no one does it looks like I'm returning it and starting the saving up process for a 960gb ssd and copying the entire hard drive over.

 

Dont install your games on your SSD, leave them installed on your HDD.

 

I think your problem is you reinstalled windows onto the new drive? this will totally bork your installs as the windows installation has no record of any of the registry settings associated with the installs.

 

A "quick fix" way to get your save games and most settings back is to do the following

 

Almost ALL of your save games and data related to saves are kept in your appdata folder (usually the Local folder), bring up Run (windows key + R) and type %APPDATA%

 

This folder has most of your saves in it, what you need to do is find the Appdata folder on your old harddrive, likley at c:\Users\your name\AppData (it will be on whatever drive letter is assigned to your HDD.

 

Copy the "Local" folder from the old appdata folder into the new one on your SSD (the one that comes up when you type %APPDATA% in run)

 

Further, from your old "users" folder you can browse your old desktop for shortcuts and get your start menu items back.