New SSD for OS

LtThompson · November 27, 2017

So I'm maxed out of space on my boot SSD. Have a couple questions in regards to getting a new one.

Based on the current sales - I've narrowed it down to 2 choices: Samsung EVO 850 250GB ($89.99) or the WD Blue 250GB ($69.99).

I do a fair bit of gaming - but all of my games are on my other SSDs and HDDs. So this new SSD will just be replacing my current 120GB boot SSD. I want to try to minimize adding additional files to this new boot drive.

So between the 2 which would you recommend. The specs of the Samsung seems slightly better. But is it worth the $20 difference? Would I be able to see any appreciable difference, for that additional cost?

My other concern is clone imaging. When I go to clone the source SSD - on the destination SSD, will it create a partition of the exact size of the source SSD (~120GB)? Or would it expand it to the entire size (~250GB) of the destination SSD?

Also ... dumb question - but for the actual clone imaging process itself - I'm not hooking up the destination SSD to the source SSD right? Just plug the destination SSD into the motherboard and that's it?

Does anyone have anything particularly good or bad to say about either the Samsung or WD (Acronis) migration software? I've read generally pretty much good things, and the occasional bad reviews about them.

Cyracus · November 27, 2017

I don't know of any good reason to have over 120gb for a boot drive, if I were you I'd leave my boot drive and just use the ssd for games particularly hindered by load times and keep the boot drive limited to os and programs that you use a lot (or just any programs that don't eat up tons of space) and have all data storage on an hdd

LtThompson · November 27, 2017

1 minute ago, Cyracus said:

I don't know of any good reason to have over 120gb for a boot drive, if I were you I'd leave my boot drive and just use the ssd for games particularly hindered by load times and keep the boot drive limited to os and programs that you use a lot (or just any programs that don't eat up tons of space) and have all data storage on an hdd

My issue is - I am out of space on this boot drive. I'm currently sitting at 124KB of free space. It's affecting day to day use (games being unable to load in Steam, Discord not being able to update -- it's affecting browsers -- just before creating this post I had to reboot my system because the text box for my OP was not showing up ... amongst other browser related issues this drive is causing). And I'm fairly certain, since there's no more space on this boot drive, it's not letting me install Windows Updates (I'm on W7).

I've removed basically any programs that I could and moved it to my non-boot SSDs/HDD. But yet I'm still out of space.