new ssd same size?

[Jevnaker]

Hi i was thinking of getting an ssd for booting my pc because it is so slow when booting into windows. would the ssd need to be the same size as the hdd i use now or can it be smaller and just transfer windows and boot stuff?

[LienusLateTips]

You would want an SSD for booting, and not storage if you have desktop. SSD only come in 2.5" for SATA.

[Jevnaker]

1 minute ago, JDE said:

You would want an SSD for booting, and not storage if you have desktop. SSD only come in 2.5" for SATA.

ok i was looking into some ssd same size as my current boot drive but it was so expensive it is for an desktop computer i forgot to mention this sorry.

[shadowbyte]

no, you can have a 240gb SSD and a 1tb hdd just fine.

I'd suggest putting windows and frequently used programs on the SSD (chrome, steam and stuff), as well as a few games that take a long time to load. All your other extraneous files can go on the HDD.

[Jevnaker]

1 minute ago, shadowbyte said:

no, you can have a 240gb SSD and a 1tb hdd just fine.

I'd suggest putting windows and frequently used programs on the SSD (chrome, steam and stuff), as well as a few games that take a long time to load. All your other extraneous files can go on the HDD.

only have one game that to me is weird in the loading and that is swtor that is more its slow loading when i alt tab back to it in fullscreen so i run that in borderless windowed mode except that i am happy with my game loadings. it is more the slow windows loading i am concerned with.

[shadowbyte]

Just now, Jevnaker said:

only have one game that to me is weird in the loading and that is swtor that is more its slow loading when i alt tab back to it in fullscreen so i run that in borderless windowed mode except that i am happy with my game loadings. it is more the slow windows loading i am concerned with.

it'll be sped up tremendously 

[Godlygamer23]

6 minutes ago, Jevnaker said:

Hi i was thinking of getting an ssd for booting my pc because it is so slow when booting into windows. would the ssd need to be the same size as the hdd i use now or can it be smaller and just transfer windows and boot stuff?

If the data that's on the hard drive is smaller than the SSD's formatted capacity, you can transfer everything over using a cloning program, but upgrading to an SSD would give you the opportunity to perform a fresh install of Windows, or upgrade to a newer version. The fresh installation is certainly recommended, and you can just delete all the Windows based stuff off the hard drive, and leave all the media files. Cloning will require that you transfer everything over, not just Windows files.

[Shiv78]

7 minutes ago, JDE said:

SSD only come in 2.5" for SATA

Eh, not really. You CAN get 3.5" ones but they are wayyyyyyyyyy overpriced, and you can also get M.2 ones 

[Jevnaker]

my current hdd is 931 gb that is the booter one. and i am staying in windows 7. and and an ssd around that size here is about 4000+- nok

[Godlygamer23]

Just now, Jevnaker said:

my current hdd is 931 gb that is the booter one. and i am staying in windows 7. and and an ssd around that size here is about 4000+- nok

How much space is being consumed on the hard drive?

[Jevnaker]

Just now, Godlygamer23 said:

How much space is being consumed on the hard drive?

134gb free right now

[Godlygamer23]

Just now, Jevnaker said:

134gb free right now

Then a straight clone will not work. You will need to perform a fresh installation of Windows.

[Jevnaker]

Just now, Godlygamer23 said:

Then a straight clone will not work. You will need to perform a fresh installation of Windows.

ok how does that work in relation to stuff i have on the current hdd and in relation to the code for my windows version?

[Godlygamer23]

Just now, Jevnaker said:

ok how does that work in relation to stuff i have on the current hdd and in relation to the code for my windows version?

As long as everything else is remaining the same(mostly the motherboard), the code should be able to be used again. The hard drive can remain the way it is, but when you install Windows, disconnect the hard drive to prevent Windows from screwing with it. If you go through the installation process with the hard drive connected, Windows might install a System Reserved partition there instead of the SSD, and effectively the hard drive will be tied to the system. If the drive dies, or otherwise becomes disconnected from the system, Windows may not be able to boot. 

 

Once everything is done, you can reconnect the hard drive(if you don't have hot-swapping enabled, turn the system off and reconnect the drive), and delete all the Windows stuff off of it and use it as a normal drive.

[Jevnaker]

ok ty i just find the folder named windows afterwards and press delte then or is there some special steps?

[Godlygamer23]

Just now, Jevnaker said:

ok ty i just find the folder named windows afterwards and press delte then or is there some special steps?

Delete the Windows folder, Temp folder, and the Users folder. Hopefully you'll have permission to do it, but if not, you can back up everything to an external device and format the internal hard drive.

 

The programs that you currently have installed might still be usable on the hard drive, but deleting the Users folder might delete some required items that are lurking in there like any saved files for video games. If you're using Steam, you shouldn't have any issues there, but certain Steam games may not support Steam Cloud, or if you're using Origin, they may also not support the cloud feature(and make sure you have it enabled as well to prevent future headaches).

[Jevnaker]

Just now, Godlygamer23 said:

Delete the Windows folder, Temp folder, and the Users folder. Hopefully you'll have permission to do it, but if not, you can back up everything to an external device and format the internal hard drive.

 

The programs that you currently have installed might still be usable on the hard drive, but deleting the Users folder might delete some required items that are lurking in there like any saved files for video games. If you're using Steam, you shouldn't have any issues there, but certain Steam games may not support Steam Cloud, or if you're using Origin, they may also not support the cloud feature(and make sure you have it enabled as well to prevent future headaches).

just uninstalled the only  game i had on the pc via origin ie bf1 so no worries there. should an ssd between 200-399gb be enough? and is there any manufacturerers i should stay away from?

[Godlygamer23]

3 minutes ago, Jevnaker said:

just uninstalled the only  game i had on the pc via origin ie bf1 so no worries there. should an ssd between 200-399gb be enough? and is there any manufacturerers i should stay away from?

I'm not sure what SSD capacities you'll find on the market(they probably go all over the place), but I would keep the range between 240GB and 480GB, especially if you plan on installing larger games onto the SSD in the future. As far as manufacturers are concerned, there isn't one that really stands out to me, but as with all products, reviews from websites such as Anandtech, Hardware Canucks, and TechPowerUp are your friend. 

 

Kingston and OCZ both have made SSDs that kinda sucked, and I think for Kingston, that was some V series drive.

[Jevnaker]

looking at some by corsair and some by crucial

Edited February 27, 2017 by Jevnaker
i removed wd fromt he running

[JoostinOnline]

27 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

I'm not sure what SSD capacities you'll find on the market(they probably go all over the place), but I would keep the range between 240GB and 480GB, especially if you plan on installing larger games onto the SSD in the future. As far as manufacturers are concerned, there isn't one that really stands out to me, but as with all products, reviews from websites such as Anandtech, Hardware Canucks, and TechPowerUp are your friend. 

 

Kingston and OCZ both have made SSDs that kinda sucked, and I think for Kingston, that was some V series drive.

OCZ has also made some great ones too though.  It was sort of hit-and-miss.  Awhile back both Kingston and PNY started selling drives with asynchronous NAND, which was about half the speed (despite not updating their benchmarks).  I think they went back to synchronous NAND again, but ever since then I've been wary of them

 

I watch prices for a ton of SSD's (cloning is one of the services I provide for my business), and I'm currently recommending this one to people.  It's got incredibly high random 4K read speeds.

[Godlygamer23]

2 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

OCZ has also made some great ones too though.  It was sort of hit-and-miss.  Awhile back both Kingston and PNY started selling drives with asynchronous NAND, which was about half the speed (despite not updating their benchmarks).  I think they went back to synchronous NAND again, but ever since then I've been wary of them

 

I watch prices for a ton of SSD's (cloning is one of the services I provide for my business), and I'm currently recommending this one to people.  It's got incredibly high random 4K read speeds.

That's why I stated that reviews are the OP's best friend. No manufacturer in my eyes stands out as being outright terrible. They all have made terrible products I'm sure, and reviews will help to rectify that provided that they're in-depth enough, like what TPU and Anandtech do.

[JoostinOnline]

1 minute ago, Godlygamer23 said:

That's why I stated that reviews are the OP's best friend. No manufacturer in my eyes stands out as being outright terrible. They all have made terrible products I'm sure, and reviews will help to rectify that provided that they're in-depth enough, like what TPU and Anandtech do.

I agree.  Most important is the recent reviews too.  The bait-and-switch habit with SSD's is shouldn't exist, but it does.

[Jevnaker]

5 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

I agree.  Most important is the recent reviews too.  The bait-and-switch habit with SSD's is shouldn't exist, but it does.

looked into an samsung evo 850 something and it had a lot of good reviews but they werent sorted by date so it was like 5 from 2015 1 from 2016 and then one from 2017

[JoostinOnline]

11 minutes ago, Jevnaker said:

looked into an samsung evo 850 something and it had a lot of good reviews but they werent sorted by date so it was like 5 from 2015 1 from 2016 and then one from 2017

Samsung is usually top-of-the-line, and the 850 Evo line is no exception.  Take a look at the reviews on Amazon.  You can filter out reviews by a specific model too.

 

There is something you should keep in mind when reading reviews for either Samsung or Crucial products.  Ignore anyone who praises RAPID (on Samsung drives) or Momentum Cache (on Crucial drives).  They don't understand what those modes do, just notice a huge benchmark improvement.  All RAPID and MC do is cache data you access frequently to your RAM, a process that Windows already does on its own with Superfetch (although that's exclusive to executables).  If you're opening the same picture a million times in a row, that's going to be helpful, but chances are you won't be.  The reason people think RAPID and MC are amazing is because they fool benchmarks.  What ends up happening is it caches the benchmark files, leading to your RAM speeds being shown in the results.  There isn't any actual real-world performance improvement, just a bunch of wasted RAM.

[Jevnaker]

12 hours ago, JoostinOnline said:

Samsung is usually top-of-the-line, and the 850 Evo line is no exception.  Take a look at the reviews on Amazon.  You can filter out reviews by a specific model too.

 

There is something you should keep in mind when reading reviews for either Samsung or Crucial products.  Ignore anyone who praises RAPID (on Samsung drives) or Momentum Cache (on Crucial drives).  They don't understand what those modes do, just notice a huge benchmark improvement.  All RAPID and MC do is cache data you access frequently to your RAM, a process that Windows already does on its own with Superfetch (although that's exclusive to executables).  If you're opening the same picture a million times in a row, that's going to be helpful, but chances are you won't be.  The reason people think RAPID and MC are amazing is because they fool benchmarks.  What ends up happening is it caches the benchmark files, leading to your RAM speeds being shown in the results.  There isn't any actual real-world performance improvement, just a bunch of wasted RAM.

i went on an norwegian pc builder site which also sells different stuff and it is they who built the pc i am using now and read the reviews there and eveyrbody in reviews basically said it was so much faster they didn't mention any spesific stuff like you are talking about. only negative reviews was trouble related to cloning. do you think it is compatible with my ASUS B85M-G, Socket-1150 motherboard?