SSD Thread: (its good, ignore the anime)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > SSD Thread: (its good, ignore the anime)

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

Question: I have one 1TB Evo 950 SSD in my PC. I just bought another one because gently caress having to uninstall games to make space. On Windows 10, what's the best, hassle-free option to add the new drive's space to C: ?

# ¿ Dec 25, 2016 16:05

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 13:19

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

nielsm posted:

Short answer: You don't.

Long answer: It's troublesome and a really bad idea for several reasons.
The main thing is that to "merge" two physical storage devices you have to use either RAID or similar in either RAID-0 or JBOD mode, and both of those will decrease reliability: Instead of one point of failure you now have two points of failure, and if either of those two fail you lose everything. Arguably JBOD is safer in that you will typically be able to recover more data in case of failure, but it's still a larger risk.
Running a RAID mode will most likely decrease performance with NVMe devices.
Having your operating system on a software RAID can be quite troublesome.

Just do the sane thing and have it appear as an additional drive.
If you want to be fancy you can have it mounted as a subfolder on C: rather than as a separate drive letter. E.g. you could actually have the second drive mounted as "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps" and then everything placed under that folder would be on the second drive, but nothing else would. It's not quite merging the two together to a single large space, but it looks somewhat similar. It obviously gives different limitations than having it as a straight separate drive letter too.

Thanks. There's no real reason not to have it as an additional drive other than for neatness' sake.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2016 22:46

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

Potato Salad posted:

This was the good answer too. Most applications are drive agnostic per best practice now, so it's not too much trouble during install of games (especially Steam games) to switch to G: or whatever else you want to label the game drive.

Playing around with volume extrnsion or raid on a typical home / gaming computer can get you into a pickle that's hard to wiggle out of later down the road. One volume, one drive.

I mean the other reason is that I'm gonna have 30-40gb just sitting free on the first drive and it'll bug me for the obvious OCD reasons but I can live with that.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2016 23:41

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

Sorry everyone, I need someone to talk to me like I'm a small child.

I recently bought a WD M.2. SSD to add to my system. My motherboard is an Asus Maximus Ranger VIII and I already have 2 SATA SSD drives in the Sata 1 and 2 slots. The manual says to me that if I put the M.2 drive into SATA mode then it will use the first 2 SATA slots. It is silent on what happens if its in PCIE mode. It is also silent on where these settings are.

Anyone know what my path forwards to turning the thing on is?

# ¿ Mar 5, 2020 21:32

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

ItBreathes posted:

E: misread, is it an NVMe or SATA M.2 drive? If it's NVMe see below, if it's SATA just change which ports your existing drives are plugged into.

If it's in PCIe mode it won't gently caress with your SATA slots since it's not using them, and it should autoconfigure since it's an NVMe (which is PCIe) not a SATA drive.

It's NVMe (this one), but I'm not seeing it in windows or in any bios option.

e: it is entirely possible I am an idiot who didn't physically slot the card in properly.

Alchenar fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Mar 5, 2020

# ¿ Mar 5, 2020 21:44

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

This is a little optional upgrade that's the groundwork for a potential entirely new system later in the year so I'm not fussed at all if I can't get it to work.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2020 21:49

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

ItBreathes posted:

I mean if it's not showing up at all a. check that the M.2 slot you have it in supports NVMe, some of them don't, and b. if you're sure it's in right and in the right slot and it's still not showing return it.

Ah, from the Asus page:

"1 x M.2 Socket 3, , with M Key, type 2242/2260/2280/22110 storage devices support (both SATA & PCIE mode)*1"

Probably not actually NVMe. And the BIOS only supports AHCI mode. Little unsure what 'PCIE mode' is supposed to be here but I'm content not to waste hours of my life on this.

e: I'm also content not to swapping out the sata controllers on my other hard drives to clear space for the M.2 sata interface given there's a great big graphics card that was hell to get into place blocking the way. It's an instalment on future PC.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2020 22:02

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

Wait have I missed something important: https://documents.westerndigital.co...ck-nvme-ssd.pdf

Does the M.2 drive have to be the boot drive? The installation instructions imply it should be.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2020 22:22

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

The plot thickens!

Bios can definitely see the drive and shows it as a viable boot option but it isn't appearing in windows: https://imgur.com/a/d2owz2d

e: ahahaha okay it's all done. WD just hide the fact that their internal drives come unformatted or partitioned and you need to do that in Windows. Because they have space to write 'we recommend a professional installation' but not 'btw you need to format this thing and windows won't prompt you'.

e2: thank you everyone for your guidance.

Alchenar fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Mar 5, 2020

# ¿ Mar 5, 2020 22:49

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 13:19

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

Klyith posted:

this is true of pretty much all internal drives, for future reference

Oh yeah, but I build once every 4-5 years so this is a lesson I'm pretty sure I learn and then forget every time. It's just irritating that in 2020 Windows will still happily detect a new drive but not prompt the user in any way to do what's necessary to activate it.

e: and also the general experience of stepping away from building for 5 years and then coming back. You find that some things have taken giant leaps forwards, and then other things will just not work until you push a button somewhere hidden deep in windows.

Alchenar fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Mar 6, 2020

# ¿ Mar 6, 2020 00:10

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > SSD Thread: (its good, ignore the anime)