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Dalien
Registered Hodor
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I did some research and answered some of my questions above. 850 pro vs. evo is basically no difference unless you are doing some serious business level shit. For normal use you won't notice a difference. Either way performance is apparently much better than the 840 models.
For cloning I grabbed this at Frys for $20 and it works great:Corsair 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive and Hard Disk Drive Cloning Kit. Comes with a USB->SATA cable and software, no fuss at all to use.
As far as storage drives go they had Western Digital 6TB drives for $250 and 4TB for $150, will have to wait on these because money, but would like to know if they are decent or shit drives.
For cloning I grabbed this at Frys for $20 and it works great:Corsair 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive and Hard Disk Drive Cloning Kit. Comes with a USB->SATA cable and software, no fuss at all to use.
As far as storage drives go they had Western Digital 6TB drives for $250 and 4TB for $150, will have to wait on these because money, but would like to know if they are decent or shit drives.
Jovec
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At these capacities you have to have a backup solution regardless of make/model.
Jysin
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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You are really missing out on not having an SSD as your boot "C:" drive. Can I ask why you have 500G stuffed on your C drive now? Sure, the 1TB version is nice but god damn is it expensive. There's no reason to have so much stuff jammed up on your boot disk. I use a 512GB Samsung 850 Pro and have quite a few games and a couple VMs loaded up on it and it is nowhere near full.
Get yourself a good 850 Evo boot drive and grab another traditional storage disk for your media or whatever else you currently have piled up on your C: drive.
jooka
marco esquandolas
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Think the 1TB SSD is going to be the new C: drive. We use the Hitachi linked below at work a lot(I'm talking in the 1000's here), work well. We moved away from WD's awhile back.
HITACHI 0F14681 Deskstar 7K4000 4TB 7200RPM SATA 6.0GB 3.5 HDS724040ALE640 HD - Newegg.com
HITACHI 0F14681 Deskstar 7K4000 4TB 7200RPM SATA 6.0GB 3.5 HDS724040ALE640 HD - Newegg.com
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Don't clone your Windows install onto the SSD. It won't realize it's an SSD and there will be more problems than it's worth.
Jysin
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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^ This ^
There are some programs like Intel's migration software that can configure the drive correctly, but it is NOT the norm. When your SSD is being set-up the first time during the partitioning and OS install, there are quite a few things that are different. (write alignment, indexing, prefetch, etc) If you just clone over, you are going to have sub-par performance.
Back up the files you need and do a clean install.
Dalien
Registered Hodor
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Thanks for the replies and advice, I've been out of the loop for a while on tech stuff and feel like a total noob now.
To fix this will I need to wipe the SSD completely and do a fresh Windows install? Or can I just boot off the Windows DVD and reinstall over the existing one? I ask because some of the programs I use for work are a pain in the ass to activate if I have to reinstall them, so would like to avoid if possible. I'll do whatever is necessary though just want to do it right. Running Win7 Ultimate if that matters.
I don't remember which color they were. Regardless it sounds like drives that size are a bad idea? I have one (potentially two if I ditch my 60GB SSD) SATA slots open so what would you guys suggest using for storage?
It was my only hard drive for a long ass time so there's lots of old programs and such that I didn't want to move off it. Along with backups from my older computer and other misc stuff. I did some cleanup last night before cloning it and freed up around 200GB on it. Yeah the 1TB SSD is expensive but I'm looking at it as something that will last a good 5-10 years (also, Frys gift cards from Santa cut the price in half).
Yeah...oops. It's cloned and booting off the SSD now, but I haven't really done anything with it since. My old C: drive is hooked up as storage now so everything is backed up.
To fix this will I need to wipe the SSD completely and do a fresh Windows install? Or can I just boot off the Windows DVD and reinstall over the existing one? I ask because some of the programs I use for work are a pain in the ass to activate if I have to reinstall them, so would like to avoid if possible. I'll do whatever is necessary though just want to do it right. Running Win7 Ultimate if that matters.
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Okay, what you need to do is disconnect all other drives so only the new SSD is seen by the BIOS.
Boot into Windows 8.1 setup (Windows 8.1 is way preferable to Windows 7 if you're using an SSD as a boot drive, way more SSD optimizations.)
When you get to the screen that lets you select what drive you want to install to, hit the key the brings up the command console.
At the command prompt, type Diskpart, press Enter.
Type List Disk, press Enter.
Type Select Disk # (where # is the number your drive shows up as), press Enter.
Type Clean, press Enter.
Type Exit, press Enter.
If you're using a motherboard that has a UEFI bios you'll also want to type Convert GPT and press enter after you do the Clean step in order to setup your new drive as UEFI secure boot enabled.
Then exit out of the console and install Windows 8.1 to that blank drive. It will create a system partition and a possibly a small recovery partition for you. Get Windows up and running THEN reconnect your drives and recover whatever documents and other data you need from them. You can keep the Steam folder intact, move it to wherever you want, and then install the Steam web installer on top of that folder to setup steam properly with windows while not actually having to redownload all your games. Your Steam games will run their little silent installers to register with Windows properly the first time they're run after that.
This process of disconnecting your old drives before installing Windows is the only easy way to get your computer to have a clean BCD Store (Boot Configuration Data) and the appropriate system partitions.
Boot into Windows 8.1 setup (Windows 8.1 is way preferable to Windows 7 if you're using an SSD as a boot drive, way more SSD optimizations.)
When you get to the screen that lets you select what drive you want to install to, hit the key the brings up the command console.
At the command prompt, type Diskpart, press Enter.
Type List Disk, press Enter.
Type Select Disk # (where # is the number your drive shows up as), press Enter.
Type Clean, press Enter.
Type Exit, press Enter.
If you're using a motherboard that has a UEFI bios you'll also want to type Convert GPT and press enter after you do the Clean step in order to setup your new drive as UEFI secure boot enabled.
Then exit out of the console and install Windows 8.1 to that blank drive. It will create a system partition and a possibly a small recovery partition for you. Get Windows up and running THEN reconnect your drives and recover whatever documents and other data you need from them. You can keep the Steam folder intact, move it to wherever you want, and then install the Steam web installer on top of that folder to setup steam properly with windows while not actually having to redownload all your games. Your Steam games will run their little silent installers to register with Windows properly the first time they're run after that.
This process of disconnecting your old drives before installing Windows is the only easy way to get your computer to have a clean BCD Store (Boot Configuration Data) and the appropriate system partitions.
Jovec
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HGST is what I'd buy if buying today. They seem to be at thetop of the reliability charts. If you aren't doing anything fancy with your storage (like RAID, ZFS, or NAS, etc) and plan to use one drive as a data drive and then another as a backup drive, you may want to consider buying a drive of one brand and a second drive of another, with the reasoning that the same manufacturing defect or design flaw won't effect both drives.
The issue with 4TB+ drives is that the possibility of errors increases to a level where you have to reasonably expect to encounter one over the usable life of the drive. There are articles on the net talking about this, mostly related to RAID5, but the logic applies to single drives.
Evernothing
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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FYI these keys appear to be KMS licenses, it's Windows 8.1 Build 9600.
I had to use this to properly activate it:
EDIT: It seems it was a misunderstanding, the seller issued that key twice and offered a brand new valid key in it's place.
Dalien
Registered Hodor
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Thanks for the advice all, I guess the best option is to wipe it clean and let Windows repartition the SSD. Going to probably be a big pain in the ass but it's best to get it over with now and restart with a proper setup. Here's hoping that Autodesk etc aren't cockholes about reactivating their software.
Jysin
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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I purchased 8.1 Pro from that guy and didn't go through that headache. I loaded from a Windows media creation tool, then installed with the GVLK key license, then a few days later activated with the seller's key via the normal windows activation tool.
Appendix A: KMS Client Setup Keys
Evernothing
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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Interesting, my copy worked for about 1 hour then Windows popped up with an activation window, saying it was in use by another PC. But the toolkit sorted me out.
Mine was Win 8.1 Core (Retail), which shouldn't use KMS anyway...
On another note, I got a Monitor and 512gb SSD for Christmas, so my build is totally complete:http://pcpartpicker.com/p/FDKRMp
EDIT: It seems it was a misunderstanding, the seller issued that key twice and offered a brand new valid key in it's place.
Mine was Win 8.1 Core (Retail), which shouldn't use KMS anyway...
On another note, I got a Monitor and 512gb SSD for Christmas, so my build is totally complete:http://pcpartpicker.com/p/FDKRMp
EDIT: It seems it was a misunderstanding, the seller issued that key twice and offered a brand new valid key in it's place.
Joeboo
Molten Core Raider
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I've had Windows 8 for probably 6 months now, and I like it. Once you set it up to just boot to desktop, it's basically just like using a faster version of Win 7. I don't screw with any of that Metro stuff, it's pointless unless you are on a touchscreen device, IMHO
Evernothing
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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8.1 is way better than 8 I've found so far, it makes it more similar to 7 than the original 8 was.
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There is only one set of "KMS keys" these days. They allow the use of a custom KMS in an enterprise to activate Windows. If you're going to Microsoft for activation, you aren't using those keys. You are using Microsoft's KMS with a retail key (or VL key, which are handled the same way these days).
They are published, by the way, at the URL Jysin linked above. If this is the key you bought, you were swindled.
They are published, by the way, at the URL Jysin linked above. If this is the key you bought, you were swindled.