Question Moving windows to new SSD...

GreyMutton

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So I think this may be a bit of a daft question but anyway....

In my haste building my current PC I bought a 2tb nvme drive and so everything is installed on it. I've been seeing from most other builds that people tend to install windows on a smaller SSD and keep the larger one for everything else.

I'm considering buying another nvme but would this require a full windows reinstall or is there anyway to just transfer it?

If I need to do a reinstall would that then mean reformatting the existing drive in order to get rid of the windows install currently on it? Just thinking I cannot be arsed to reinstall all my games etc.

I feel like I'm asking this in the hope for an easy solution but I already know I'm not gonna get one 😂
 
I've just put windows on my biggest drive. It is down to personal preference

You can get cloning software (acronis is one) but it took me 5 minutes to reinstall windows the other day.
 
I'd keep it as it is. I have a 1tb NVME as my C drive. I also have 2 x 3Tb 7200 RPM conventional drives for data storage and backup files. Works OK for me......
 
I've just put windows on my biggest drive. It is down to personal preference

You can get cloning software (acronis is one) but it took me 5 minutes to reinstall windows the other day.

Ah I was starting to think there was a reason to have it separate. Fair enough I might just leave it as is.

It's probably just my urge to tinker bubbling up 😅
 
For how quickly you can install windows i would get a smaller drive and put windows on that , then just clean the drive you have now and use it for storage ...

but like Delvey says it down to personal preference.
iv always done it that way ... ( just in case the drive fails in some way , then you won't loose everything )
 
in the old days reformatting the C and reinstalling windows was something you did from time to time to fix it/speed it up etc. To be honest its just not needed with anything like the frequency now so its a bit of a hang on of having it on separate drive, you can achieve the same thing by partitioning a larger drive if you only have one physical drive but I don't think theirs much point any more. I am not going to bother on my next PC - 1TB C: it is.
 
You can always just partition the drive, keep your C drive to a couple of hundred GB and the rest as your D drive.
 
but like Delvey says it down to personal preference.
iv always done it that way ... ( just in case the drive fails in some way , then you won't loose everything )

There was an obvious performance benefit when using traditional hard drives and having stuff on separate drives.

Then when SSDs came along they were expensive so you went with a small one for performance from Windows.

These days it will be negligible if any difference particularly with nvme drives.

I would also stick as you are, then if you do start running out of disk space buy another then. It should be cheaper by that stage and with a gen 4 one depending on motherboard and gpu you may get extra features that Nvidia have touted.

Also like @sykotik mentions drives can fail but you should always have a backup of your drive
 
Also like @sykotik mentions drives can fail but you should always have a backup of your drive
Yep. Anything on my C drive is loseable (games can be downloaded again).
All my photos and documents are kept on a seperate hard drive which is backed up once a month to another hard drive via a caddy
 
Yep. Anything on my C drive is loseable (games can be downloaded again).
All my photos and documents are kept on a seperate hard drive which is backed up once a month to another hard drive via a caddy
My current PC is used pretty much exclusively for gaming at the moment. I have a couple of USB drives somewhere with other stuff backed up from a previous build. Although, considering I've not felt the need to check them in about 5 years it's safe to say there's nothing on there that's that important.

I may get back into photo/video editing at some point so, if I do, I'll buy another drive for that stuff.

Thanks for the replies. Last time I built a PC it was using a mix of SSD for the boot drive and HDD for the rest. I couldn't think of a reason to have a similar set up this time given SSDs are so much cheaper now but I kept seeing builds with 2 and I started to think I'd made a mistake. Good to know it's really just a hangover from the old days 👍
 
I forgot about the cost thing as well, as mentioned by chuckmountain above. There was a period where 128GB or 256GB SSD's were still rather expensive but worth it for the boot drive and a 1TB HDD for data/games was a good idea. I just bought a 1TB Gen3 x4 NVMe for £85 so those days are gone, good bye 256GB SSD we shall not be buying you again.
 
Although I checked my PC and I've filled half of my 2tb nvme drive with games in 5 months. And I thought I'd probably never need another drive 😂🙄
 
Although I checked my PC and I've filled half of my 2tb nvme drive with games in 5 months. And I thought I'd probably never need another drive 😂🙄
I have 2.5GB worth of SSD now.
Games are just getting bigger and bigger. New COD is 150gb, MSFS the same (and more with cache).
 
Few weeks ago I had a clear out , their was games that I hadn't played in over 4 years,
Save my self about 700gb deleting them
So I was able to remove a 2tb hdd and drop in a 1th ssd .
 
Ah I was starting to think there was a reason to have it separate. Fair enough I might just leave it as is.

It's probably just my urge to tinker bubbling up 😅
For me its just down to having just the OS on a smaller drive so its cheaper to replace compared to the chunkier drives and if something does go wrong with the OS drive or it corrupts and I end up having to reformat everything is safe on a separate drive altogether.
 
Had an absolute nightmare yesterday I had about 10000 photos and videos which were stored on my old pc and I thought my external Seagate 4tb hard drive. That hard drive would not be recognised by my new pc, so I had to bite the bullet and reformat it, not a problem all my photos are on old internal pc drive.
I decided I would get rid of a couple of useless pictures deleting them in the photo app, next minute they are all gone 😢
Absolute panic set in every picture of my daughter gone, holidays gone the lot. So I go to the recycle bin, nothing there ! Reboot pc and they are there but not all of them. About 10%!are missing so I managed to find the hidden files but they are corrupt! Absolutely gutted🤬
I can it seems transfer those files to a usb stick, so should I do this and someone maybe able to recover them who has skills or do they need to do it on my old pc? It too me 10 hours to manual copy to a usb stick to my new pc yesterday. So my next question is where and in what do people back their things on, my old seagate seems now not want to hold anything it times out when copying stuff! I’m thinking of buying a 1TB sata ssd just for the photos
Sorry for the long rant.
 
The reason people installed windows on a separate SSD was back "in them olden dayes" SSDs were small and expensive. So it made sense to put windows on a small SSD drive for boot performance and the rest of your applications and/or data on much cheaper and larger HDDs.

If you have a 2TB SSD with everything on it including windows, keep it that way - there's no point moving windows to its own drive.
 
Had an absolute nightmare yesterday I had about 10000 photos and videos which were stored on my old pc and I thought my external Seagate 4tb hard drive. That hard drive would not be recognised by my new pc, so I had to bite the bullet and reformat it, not a problem all my photos are on old internal pc drive.
I decided I would get rid of a couple of useless pictures deleting them in the photo app, next minute they are all gone 😢
Absolute panic set in every picture of my daughter gone, holidays gone the lot. So I go to the recycle bin, nothing there ! Reboot pc and they are there but not all of them. About 10%!are missing so I managed to find the hidden files but they are corrupt! Absolutely gutted🤬
I can it seems transfer those files to a usb stick, so should I do this and someone maybe able to recover them who has skills or do they need to do it on my old pc? It too me 10 hours to manual copy to a usb stick to my new pc yesterday. So my next question is where and in what do people back their things on, my old seagate seems now not want to hold anything it times out when copying stuff! I’m thinking of buying a 1TB sata ssd just for the photos
Sorry for the long rant.
Various options are available. What I would say is, do not use that hard drive until you have said software. The data will still be on it until it is written over.
 
Have a 500GB NVMe FireCuda for OS and current game I'm playing for superfast access times, and a pair of 1TB Samsung Evo SSDs for bulk game storage.

I use Acronis to re-image drives. Easy going from old hard drive to new SSD without need to reinstall OS. Use at work too.

My Media files (Movies, Photos, Music) are held on 17TB (5TB & 12TB) of drives with an Intel NUC as Plex media server, backed up to my 24TB QNAP NAS.
 
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Plus, for family pics and Home movies I also have two out of house backups on 2 x 256GB USB sticks. One lives in car, other at work. Update each month as needed (dont have large number of family pics/short vids, so 256GB is fine.).

PS with our virtual servers at work I still keep OS drive as a seperate to the Data dives even though in reality they all reside on a mirror pair of 2 x 12 core servers of 2 x 16 Raid10 drives (32 2TB drives in total). They backup each day to a dedicated 4 disk Raid10 backup server and at weekend a 2nd backup to a fireproof drive then stored in a fireproof/waterproof/theft proof safe. I did have a backup sync to our 2nd site but too slow really even over our 50/50 dedicated fibre.

Don't put total trust in cloud storage.
 
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Don't put total trust in cloud storage.
And you'd be correct - cloud storage is not a complete backup solution. Any corruption or deletion on your local machine can and will be replicated to the cloud version.

However, it really depends on what you require. Personally I'm happy with my cloud services since they're really there such that I can bore people with my photos no matter where they are. And if my PC or phone dies or my house burns down, the data is safe.
 
And you'd be correct - cloud storage is not a complete backup solution. Any corruption or deletion on your local machine can and will be replicated to the cloud version.

However, it really depends on what you require. Personally I'm happy with my cloud services since they're really there such that I can bore people with my photos no matter where they are. And if my PC or phone dies or my house burns down, the data is safe.
I don't mean Cloud Sync like OneDrive, I mean set backups at scheduled times.

You can also have your own cloud storage. I can share my Plex server files to the family outside the home.
 

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