moving c: to new drive

[Joshcanread]

Hello, my SSD sucks fucking ass and needs to be replaced asap. I currently have 2 sata hard drives and a sata SSD in the system. I have an NVMe slot which I want to use but I'm not sure if i have enough PCIe lanes. I'm using a ryzen 5 1500x which has 20 lanes I believe, a gtx1050 which uses 16 but runs fine on 8 I hear?

 

Also what is the best way to move windows to a new disk? 

[Pandur]

Any decent cloning software will do this for you

[suedseefrucht]

59 minutes ago, Joshcanread said:

I have an NVMe slot which I want to use but I'm not sure if i have enough PCIe lanes. I'm using a ryzen 5 1500x which has 20 lanes I believe, a gtx1050 which uses 16 but runs fine on 8 I hear?

It depends on your motherboard and on the CPU.

There are 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes to connect a PCIe card (like a graphics card) directly to the CPU.

But there are also 4 special PCIe 3.0 lanes (Intel calls them DMI) going from your CPU to your chipset. So all keyboard data, all mouse data, all network data, all USB data will run through these 4 lanes and they all share bandwidth.

 

So on your motherboard, the M.2 slot is probably connected to the chipset and is running data through these 4 special lanes.
Some new CPUs have 20 PCIe lanes to connect stuff directly. So a modern motherboard may connect the M.2 slot directly to the CPU, so the SSD doesn't have to share bandwidth with the chipset.

[suedseefrucht]

1 hour ago, Joshcanread said:

Also what is the best way to move windows to a new disk? 

The best and cleanest way is to put your important files on a separate drive (like one of your HDDs) and just reinstall windows and all the progams. It takes longer than cloning, but this way you have a solid base for the next few years without any old stuff you don't really need.

[wseaton]

If the current machine is running clean (other than SSD issues ) then use something like Macrium Reflect Free. 

 

Cloned zillions of machines like this. 

 

Its literally as easy as installing the NVMe, installing Macrium, cloning your existing SATA to the NVMe, and then changing your bios to boot from the NVMe.