Adding an ssd HELP

Msmith841 · January 4, 2015

So I am almost a complete noob to the pc building world. Earlier in the year I built myself a gaming machine. I then proceeded to download 400gb of games thanks to steam sales! I then found a Kingston 120gb ssd for cheap on Amazon so thought, hey why not. Now I am all but clueless on getting it running. Basically, I'd like windows, steam client, Web browser, antivirus and the likes to be on the ssd and all my games to stay on the hdd. I'd really like to do this without having to do a fresh install. I also don't have a 500gb external kicking around anywhere. Can anyone direct me to a relevant article, or even YouTube video would be great, thanks in advance

SeanBond · January 4, 2015

@Msmith841 Before you go through the trouble of setting it up, run to the post office and send it back if you have a v300 ssd now get your money back if you can. http://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ssdnow-v300-a-switch-to-slower-micron-nand

That drive is easily the worst on the market and the specs are a flatout lie. Kingston has done something seriously messed up and switches out the nand on an already established product. For About the same price there are other drives on the market 3 or 4 times faster. And that is just at the low end of the ssd world. Maybe get an m500? They go 80 for a 240gb and are a great deal faster. In my mind this is enough to boycott their ssd's entirely. That's like buying an i5 just to find out when it arrives it's a pentium. It's insane they can get away with that.

TheGeekster · January 4, 2015

He's right, but to upgrade to an SSD, ideally you do want to do a fresh install.

As for steam games, you'll want to back up your games to a file on the hard drive to avoid reinstalling them all by download, then when you've freshly installed the system again, set the steam library to the hard drive, you can restore the backed up files so the majority of the game will not need to be downloaded (few odd bits might need to be though)

How big is the hard drive? Sometimes it's unavoidable to do a reinstall unless you've got the correct equipment and spares. The only way to clone your drive accross, would be to get your boot drive down to less than 120gb full, then using something like acronis true image to mirror it across, but as you said you don't have an external hard drive or anything to put the data onto.