Need a New Desktop

MarkH said:
My suggestion to most people trying this for the first time is unplug the old hard drive, and plug those connections into the SSD. Then reinstall. After windows is installed, connect the old hard drive to the system.

This ensures that you cannot overwrite your data, and it eases the connections because you just have to move them to the SSD and make the new connections on the hard drive after the install worked.
Click to expand...
That makes sense. A friend I was talking to this morning made that same recommendation. I'll give it a try. Thanks.
 
Fallsrider said:
OK, I got the new SSD installed, formatted, and a name given to the drive. So now my computer recognizes the drive in File Explorer.

I'm unclear, however, how to install Win10 from the recovery disk (USB) onto the new SSD. Can someone walk me through that? I tried searching online, but haven't found an answer I understand yet. Will I be given an option of the drive to restore to? I don't want to go too far into it and I lose my original hard drive because it starts restoring to that drive instead of the new one. Thanks.
Click to expand...

I forget.

Do you want a clean windows install or do you just want to copy what you have to the newer faster SSD?

If the latter... Macrium Reflect free version.

https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

Best imaging software out there IMHO.
 
Buy one with an SSD. It boots much faster and the programs you use start faster than on a computer with an HDD.
 
denverpilot said:
I forget.

Do you want a clean windows install or do you just want to copy what you have to the newer faster SSD?

If the latter... Macrium Reflect free version.

https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

Best imaging software out there IMHO.
Click to expand...
My intention has been to get a clean install. But so far, I have not been able to get that to work. I followed the advice above and unplugged my HD, hoping the thumb drive would install onto the new SSD. But no luck. I tried twice and it just hasn't worked. It goes through the long process of slowly counting up through the percentages of restoration, then it gives me an error message and tells me that it could not complete the restoration. No explanation, or anything.

So I may be forced to do a clone, and I'll look up that software if I do. A clone would probably be fine, but I was just hoping to get rid of all the extraneous stuff that slows the computer down that builds up over time.
 
Without the error ID will be hard to be more detailed but my guess is your USB stick is misbehaving. Easy step to try - put it in a different USB port. If that doesn’t work, try a new usb stick. Or go the Macrium clone route. Win 10 does have an option to restore itself to a clean state. In my recent experience, it gets rid of the regular software but left behind some litter.
 
masloki said:
Without the error ID will be hard to be more detailed but my guess is your USB stick is misbehaving. Easy step to try - put it in a different USB port. If that doesn’t work, try a new usb stick. Or go the Macrium clone route. Win 10 does have an option to restore itself to a clean state. In my recent experience, it gets rid of the regular software but left behind some litter.
Click to expand...

I may try cloning my HD over to the new SSD. Then try a clean restore on the SSD. That way I will still have my HD as a backup of all my files.
 
Fallsrider said:
I may try cloning my HD over to the new SSD. Then try a clean restore on the SSD. That way I will still have my HD as a backup of all my files.
Click to expand...

That’s a pretty good idea. Also if your restore USB is from the machine manufacturer, you could make one from Windows Media Creator available here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO

It won’t restore the restore partition or any manufacturer specific drivers however.
 
With all this computer talk I decided to finally update what i'm working with. I have been running the same desk top unit for at least 15 years, I know, living in the stone age. What really has driven the update is the need for video editing speed. It was time.

I purchased a Dell G3 gaming laptop, and I'll reuse my monitor and wireless keyboard and mouse. Here are the specs.

9th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-9750H
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1650 4GB GDDR5
16GB, 2x8GB, DDR4, 2666MHz
256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive (Boot) + 1TB 5400 rpm 2.5" SATA Hard Drive (Storage)
15.6-in. display
I also added
WD Elements 3TB Portable External Hard Drive
Anker USB C Hub 4 port
 
GMascelli said:
What really has driven the update is the need for video editing speed.

...

1TB 5400 rpm 2.5" SATA Hard Drive (Storage)
Click to expand...

...

I’d plan on ripping that out for video editing unless all of your projects can be edited and rendered and such on the smallish SSD then copied later.

Couple of ways to go about that... pull the spinning disk and put an SSD in where it came from...

Or even upgrade the M2 SSD with a Samsung 970 EVO Plus M2 ... 1TB is $219 right now. Unbelievably cheap.

The gaming laptops take advantage of the fact that games usually do nothing but sequential reads so maybe a 5400 RPM drive can saturate the 6Gb/s SATA channel. With non-sequential, the performance of that drive will crater. Especially compared to a decent SATA SSD.

Another thing to watch for with the i9 laptops is not getting full speed under heavy load. Some start thermal throttling before you get what you paid for on the processor. Keep it cool and your renders will go marginally faster. The on board cooling sometimes can’t keep up. The i9 runs hot.

But nice rig. Should last a while.
 
I did clone my drive using Macrium. That went flawlessly, and the new SSD definitely runs the computer faster.

However, doing a restore on the new drive failed. I tried two or three times and it wouldn't work. It did not give me an error message and would not tell me why. It just said that it was unsuccessful and no data had been lost.
 
Fallsrider said:
I did clone my drive using Macrium. That went flawlessly, and the new SSD definitely runs the computer faster.

However, doing a restore on the new drive failed. I tried two or three times and it wouldn't work. It did not give me an error message and would not tell me why. It just said that it was unsuccessful and no data had been lost.
Click to expand...

Interesting. Would be hard to tell from here why the restore is barfing but we usually don’t see that.

SSDs even SATA ones really brought life back to a lot of machines that were plenty fast, they’re just waiting around on slow storage.

It was pretty amazing how the industry kept touting that you needed a faster processor or more RAM while shoving 5400 RPM drives in laptops.

The PCIe 4 lane M2 interfaces going into modern stuff along with the cheap as chips M2 interface SSDs that plug into those are impressive.

Now SATA even with an SSD is the slowpoke at 600 MB/sec.

Watched a video where someone tried to do a massive storage server with all 4 lane M2 drives and a motherboard that claimed to have enough PCIe lanes recently. It barfed.

The motherboard maker punted and said they didn’t intend it to be used that way. LOL. Not quite there yet. Best guess by the testers was that buffers just couldn’t handle it and the entire PCIe lane would reset.

They were able to get it to work, still wicked fast, by forcing the motherboard to PCI 2. But nowhere near what the board maker claimed.

:)
 
Zombie thread, I know. But I just wanted to be sure that the advice offered is still sound.
I am going to update our (not really old) desktop computer. I ordered a 1TB PNY SSD to replace the 1TB spinning-platter HDD it shipped with.
PNY has now gone cheap and no longer provides Acronis cloning (ghosting) software. I see that the free version of Macrium had been recommended by previous posters. Is this still a good option?

Base PC: HP Slim Desktop 270-p026, i3-7100T, 8 GB DDR4-2400 (another 8GB stick on order), Intel HD Graphics 630.
 
To the Intel NUC line, I bought one of these Beelink Mini PC's with i5 a couple of months ago and very impressed. It's used as a replacement for our 11 year old HTPC and does great job while be small and quiet.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top