SSD queries

[irishbeast]

I recently bought a 2nd hand gaming machine at a decent price that needed a facelift

 

Original spec

Ryzen 3800X

B550M gaming mother

32 gb DDR4 (2400hz)

256 SSD (Generic)

1TB SATA (Western Digital)

AMD 5700XT 8gb

 

For now the motherboard ad CPU will suffice. 

Firsly bought 16GB of 3600MHZ ram and a 1TB NVME 4.0 which I added (sold the old memory) 16GB will be fine for now as its a gaming only machine.

 

Added an RTX 4080 CPU (with much difficulty to to the size! - New case required eventually).  I said I would return to Amazon if I wasn't really impressed. I am really impressed

 

Gaming is brilliant as you would expect but the general Windows speed is painful for certain basic tasks, The CPU is not a complete dinosaur by any means, didn't make sense. Done an SSD speed check and the score for the Generic SSD was really really bad, It was like 10% of the average speeds collected. That will have to go. The chap who sold it me designed a really nice machine whih would have cost a bomb when he got it. Why penny pinch on the boot drive, that's madness!! The 1TB SATA would be better! I suspect he didn't know that all SSDs are not equal. He bought it from PC specialist and it ticks all the boxes for that I need bar this rubbish drive.

 

Question 1 - I don't want to have to reinstall windows and download everything again. I want to be able to clone the crap generic drive and replace it - Whats the best/easiest way of doing this? Don't want to have to buy another windows licence either

 

Question 2 -I have an external 1TB Crucial SSD which I never use so was going to add to the system. Can this be done cunningly without just plugging to USB as normal and taping it inside the case? Seems a bit crude but don't want the drive hanging out of a port all he time. Would be  good interim as I will get another NVME. That along with the CPU will get upgraded eventually (when my bank account recovers!)

 

There was a 3rd question but its slipped my mind, will edit the post when I remember

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[filpo]

13 minutes ago, irishbeast said:

I don't want to have to reinstall windows and download everything again. I want to be able to clone the crap generic drive and replace it - Whats the best/easiest way of doing this? Don't want to have to buy another windows licence either

I'm afraid there's no other way apart from having them both in your pc and then cloning them to the other (but it requires two m.2 slots) 

 

14 minutes ago, irishbeast said:

-I have an external 1TB Crucial SSD which I never use so was going to add to the system. Can this be done cunningly without just plugging to USB as normal and taping it inside the case? Seems a bit crude but don't want the drive hanging out of a port all he time. Would be  good interim as I will get another NVME. That along with the CPU will get upgraded eventually (when my bank account recovers!)

yes since its not a hdd that won't risk vibration that should be fine, but how are you going to power it if you don't use usb power? (maybe i misunderstood)

[irishbeast]

20 hours ago, filpo said:

I'm afraid there's no other way apart from having them both in your pc and then cloning them to the other (but it requires two m.2 slots) 

 

yes since its not a hdd that won't risk vibration that should be fine, but how are you going to power it if you don't use usb power? (maybe i misunderstood)

Thanks for response

 

That was sort of my problem! It's total silent and tiny. I wondered if I could somehow cunningly power from the board directly..

 

It's not a disaster if external. Will connect it to the usb c connection or 3.0 (whichever is fastest)

 

Would love another 2Tb nvme. The 4.0 slot is in use and the other nvme slot didn't support but still.

 

Apart from loading times is the gameplay from a sata notably worse that an SSD? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[filpo]

44 minutes ago, irishbeast said:

Thanks for response

 

That was sort of my problem! It's total silent and tiny. I wondered if I could somehow cunningly power from the board directly..

 

It's not a disaster if external. Will connect it to the usb c connection or 3.0 (whichever is fastest)

 

Would love another 2Tb nvme. The 4.0 slot is in use and the other nvme slot didn't support but still.

 

Apart from loading times is the gameplay from a sata notably worse that an SSD? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No it’s not notably worse in terms of loading times. An experiment between a hdd, Sata ssd and nvme ssd documents it well 

if you would like a good quality 2tb nvme without gen 4 (since you can’t use it) then check out the 970 evo plus 2tb

 

[irishbeast]

For some reason the generic SSD that came with the build is slower than the SATA, cant remember exact speed test results. The NVME is lightning fast. Gaming on the machine is fab but its windows thats sluggish as hell as its installed on that crap SSD. Don't understand why the guy built what was top of the range about 2 years ago but cheaped out on an boot SSD. CPU is not breaking a sweat and its a 3800X which is ok for now. Anything that involves the C: drive (generic SSD) is like watching paint dry. Downloaded steam in about 1 minute and took about half an hour to install it on the drive!

 

I have a spare 128GB SSD (Sandisk one which was reasonably fast when last used) that I want to clone the current one too and hopefully just swap them over. Can it be that simple? Don't want to have to reinstall everything if I can avoid it