M.2 and HDD question

[DMulisha13]

I'm planning on having an M.2 added to my system as a boot drive. If I do that, will I be able to use my programs/games/files on my HDD or will I have to format the HDD? I would like to try and avoid formatting it because where I live the internet is pretty slow and I would like to avoid downloading all the games again.

[DMulisha13]

7 hours ago, Benji said:

If you change out the OS installation without cloning the current medium, you won't be able to keep your programs. And even if you clone it and now the HDD has a different drive letter (which it definitely will have), you'll still need to re-install all programs because now Windows doesn't know where they are and most applications actually also do some registry settings, set file extension links or install their proper runtime executables. All that will not be there anymore and that the applications are running under these circumstances is probably more luck if anything else.

So yes, you'll most likely need to re-install everything besides the Steam library which you can copy off the drive.

Will copying the HDD affect significantly how fast will the PC boot? I'm guessing that a almost full SSD still runs faster than a HDD?

[DMulisha13]

4 hours ago, Benji said:

It will but I'd still always recommend a re-install. How large is the HDD and how large is the new SSD?

The SSD is 500gb and the HDD is 1T, but around 500GB used

[DMulisha13]

4 hours ago, Benji said:

In your case I'd try to clone the HDD to the SSD if the software allows it and if it actually fits on the SSD, should you actually have no other choice due to limited internet speed. But a re-install is something that I generally encourage after such rather large changes as porting applications over to another drive, because you can rarely just "copy over" applications and it'll "just work". Windows won't even know it's installed, so uninstalling is not possible, outside of just deleting the program folders. But re-installing everything and setting it up is probably not possible for you with your internet connection.

Do you possibly have the setup files/setup media for your applications so that you can install them?

How s low is your internet connection actually?

I have most of the setup files, in reality is more about the games since they're huge files most of the time.
I have around 3MB/s, which judging for how long it takes compared to other people I know having different ISP its pretty damn slow, but its a services tied to a contract so I have to wait it out and change.

[DMulisha13]

7 hours ago, Benji said:

When it's really 3 MB/s (~25 Mbit/s) it isn't really that slow and totally sufficient, but should you mean 3 Mbit/s (~350-400 KB/s), yeah, then I probably wouldn't really re-do anything on that system until I had guaranteed access to a faster connection.

And if you didn't buy the games all-digital, they usually come with setup disks so I would probably take the risk to do a re-install on the SSD and install most games on the HDD that you don't commonly play/games that don't benefit from a faster storage medium and only install games that you play often on the SSD.

My bad, i meant 3Mbit/s it takes like 3 days to download a 40~ Gb game. *not leaving it downloading 24 hours, just at nights.
Sadly yes, they are all digital. I guess my best course of action is to clone it and hope for everything to work.