I have a windows 10 machine which boots from a 240 GB SSD plugged into a SATA port.
It is a Crucial CT240 M500 drive.
I have a 4 TB HDD plugged into a SATA port.
It is a Seagate BarraCuda ST4000DM005-2DP166 drive.
The Documents, Music, and Pictures folders in the "This PC" window map to the 4 TB HDD.
These folders amount to around 1 TB.
It stores other documents too.
Recently I had a bit of a scare with the 4 TB drive as it disappeared from the Windows Explorer after I had spent an hour or so tagging MP3 files on it via MP3tag.
It simply disappeared from the explorer window and MP3tag failed to complete the last of the tagging. Even after a few restarts it would not show.
I took it out of the machine and plugged it in via a USB 3 adapter. It displayed on the Explorer window and I made back-ups of the most important things. (I do have a rudimentary back-up scheme)
Since then the 4 TB drive has behaved normally, and the windows tools have reported nothing wrong with the drive.
The computer's motherboard has provision for an M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD.
Would I be better off getting a 2 TB M.2 SSD and transferring everything to that? Would it be wise to continue using the 4 TB drive as a back-up? (it would be useful as my photograph collection isn't shrinking).
I really don't know enough about these things to make an informed decision.
Is it possible to install Windows 10 to a new SSD or would I be forced to upgrade to 11? (I have considered Linux before anyone suggests it but for the time being it's a no-go)
Are there any benefits or drawbacks to having user data on a different drive from the boot drive like I currently have? I only did that through necessity.
I can answer this one definitely, I did it a year or so ago without trouble, which surprised me as it used to be quite difficult.
Nowadays apparently MS doesn't mind you cloning a drive and dropping the new one in. There are various free utilities to do this, I picked Macrium Reflect, for reasons I've forgotten. If you're familiar with Clonezilla, that's more versatile, but there's a bit of a learning curve.
You're unlikely to be forced into an upgrade, as most computers sold with Windows 10 officially cannot run 11 for hardware reasons, though I think Google can tell you how to get round that if you want to, and the computer is recent enough. Many Windows 10 installations were upgrades from Win 7, and that hardware probably is too old.
Where the operating system is upgradable, that can usually be done without touching user data. If you don't trust the upgrade process, separate user data is a good idea. Again, cloning Windows used to be a nuisance, so separate data allowed a bigger data drive to be fitted without disturbing the OS. None of this really matters now, so there's not much to be said either way.
I would download seagate's tools package and check the disk for errors - they may be able to identify looming errors - like a high reallocated sector count:
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You can then decide how much to trust it..
(however the general answer is that you don't trust any storage device because they *will all fail* at some point!)
If it checks out with the tools and it backed up then it is probably safe to use.
The main attraction of M2 NVMe drives is that by doing away with the bottleneck of the SATA interface they can transfer data much more quickly (SATA drives top out at about 550 MB/sec - not usually relevant on a HDD which is unlikely to be that quick, but it is with a SSD). A NVMe drive will manage several times that (read speeds over 2.5 GB/sec are not uncommon). So you get faster load and boot times, and a machine that feels more responsive.
If you want to do a fresh install you can. Download the media creation tool, and it will make a bootable DVD or USB flash drive for you:
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When installing, choose the right version of windows (i.e. home or pro depending on what you had) and skip entering the product key. It will automatically reactivate with a digital license because it has been activated on that hardware before.
However, the simple option is to just clone the existing SSD to the new one - that brings across the OS, all apps, data and settings. Plenty of free tools about that do it, and most SSD vendors will also have one you can download for use with their drives.
It is often considered good practice to shift user data off the main boot drive. It makes backup of the data easy, and also easy to do a disaster recovery backup of the main drive that it not quickly outdated by updates to the data.
(The main problem I have found with data somewhere other than C:\ is the users who can't wrap their head around the concept of having more than one drive and end up with a "full" OS disk and a terabyte of more of unused space sat there waiting!)
That is a very interesting point. The standard as preached in the tech groups was keep them physically separate so you could clone or re-install the OS without touching your data. However, as security gets tighter it can start to bring issues. I have several PCs and float between them (I didn't have a Meccano set when I was young) but the user "jeff" on one machine isn't the user "jeff" on another. Windows uses SIDs to identify users not names. I have recently started to find I don't have permission to use my own files on one machine that were created on another and have to play with CACLS and so on to get permissions right. I have temporarily switched to exFat for data drives as it doesn't store permissions but I'm not sure I would recommend it, a lot of techies wouldn't.
After you install W10 22H2, you can acquire this program (free).
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And in the interface of it, load in "10 22H2" in the boxes. By doing so, then pressing the "Take Control" button, any offers for Windows 11 should disappear. By setting the OS version to "10", that prevents any 11 from coming in. You can use the program on either W10 or W11, for control purposes. Other OSes may work, but I have not tested such.
I use that, on a couple PCs here, for version control. You can, for example, "stop" an incoming automatic upgrade, and then let it proceed, once you've made your backups or whatever. By just entering different release numbers, as the situation dictates.
All the tool does, is edit three or four registry locations. It's not magical. And Microsoft could send out a Windows Update any old day, and make those registry controls disappear.
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The SMART display tab on this, may help
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The benchmark tool, only evaluates 2.2TB of surface. While the "Health" or Bad Block scan, traverses the whole 4TB surface. This means, the benchmark tool will produce deceptive numbers, when evaluating big drives. (Buying a copy of the software, it is maintained and undoubtedly works better than the ancient freebie.)
The SMART is not affected by size issues.
Disk drive show they are unhealthy, via a benchmark curve, showing an "abnormally slow patch" of disk surface. For example, one drive I had with wear problems, a 50GB wide swath of disk surface, ran at
5 to 10MB/sec. This indicates a lot of spared-out sectors.
The SMART scheme assumes bad sectors are evenly distributed over the disk surface. When large numbers of reallocated sectors are located in one area of the disk, SMART indicates "Healthy", while in fact to the user suffering from the slow performance, the disk is definitely not healthy.
SMART has a "Reallocated" entry and a Raw Data Value. This should be 0. if the value is >0 and in the low hundreds, it means the disk is getting low on spare sectors, and CRC errors will start showing up next. The raw data is actually thresholded, and large numbers of spared sectors are not shown in the raw data. Once you get past the "factory approval" level of spare-outs, then the Raw Data Counter starts to advance. And that's why the drive is suspect at that point. It's "low on fuel". However, to be extra annoying, those drives can last for years, without dropping dead. Unlike some of the drives in the old days. It's just your data which is in danger.
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I might have one of those. ST4000DM005.
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Average annualized workload rating: <55 TB/year. <=== Oh oh. My bad.
Normally, those are terabytes of writes per year, to stay within warranty. But the numbers also have another meaning. The numbers are normally between 110 TB/year and 550 TB/year.
110 TB/year "use me only 8 hours per day, turn me off for 16 hours" ... 550 TB/year "use me 24/7 as you wish" <=== highest HDD rating I know of... double or triple the price
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Since this drive is part of your "live" partition, you need something that can stay powered, for as long as you do. If you leave the PC running when not in usage, then the ST4000DM005 is not going to like that. A SATA or M.2 NVMe, cares not about power on hours. What they care about, is nuisance writes by software that is not careful about such things. For example, the Logitech Webcam software on the other machine right now, is beating the piss out of my C: drive, by updating some logfile with bullshit, once a second. There is apparently a way to stop it. When you use flash-based devices, this is the kind of crap you start worrying about. When a hard drive is in the machine, I no longer care how badly Logitech writes software.
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A 4TB flash based device, could use TLC or QLC or (MLC-like VNAND), and I would not buy a QLC based device. TLC is not really very nice either, but this is what they sell, so it's what we buy. The third item, will cost a bit more. The third item is also technically harder to "evaluate, for goodness". We don't know what premium it is really worth.
It might have been the Samsung 990 2TB NVMe, which had premature reallocation and wear out behavior, due to a firmware issue. Those can be fixed by flashing the firmware. And with any luck, the material currently in the retail channel has been fixed.
NVme - hella fast, not all that convenient to plug in. Don't lose the hold-down screw. Angle in the stick, then bend down to horizontal plane, and insert screw.
SATA - Easy to plug and unplug. Slower than NVMe.
HDD - Could be cheaper storage. However, make sure your TB/year rating and device hours rating, are sufficient for your usage pattern. My ST4000DM005 only had 150 hours on it. My very best hard drive (out of about 34 of them), has 55000 hours on it, and it is in "mint condition". The HDTune bench curve, is indistinguishable from new. Yet, the drive is nothing special technically. I like to joke that "the guy who built it, must have washed his hands on the way back from the rest room", because the thing is flawless.
Picking hard drives, is pretty hard to do, given the lack of proper information about them. It's like ripe tomatoes sold in a welded shut box. You don't know what's going on in there. You can see the drive companies, got in shit for not being honest about which drives were SMR. So in some cases, their "carelessness" catches up with them. (PMR or CMR are the terms for the HDD kind you want. Those letters stand for "Not A Scam".)
One of the companies that makes RAID cards, has figured out a way to make a card, that in JBOD mode and with an NVMe loaded (it's an NVMe card so the sleds are right on the card), it will boot.
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Reading the reviews, that particular model is not for the faint of heart. They make a number of different models now.
It requires that the config EEPROM on the card, has a routine to do an INT 0x13 read routine. That's what is needed to make it boot.
The card is probably five hundred bucks, so only Bill Gates boots that way. The cards with four NVMe slots or eight NVMe slots, if you need to ask, you can't afford it.
Since there aren't many designs like that, it's a "bar bet card" of sorts.
It might do RAID0 and JBOD, and has room for two NVMe on the card surface.
Booting with just one NVMe, is all you really need.
I don't think my year 2000 or so, 440BX would boot from it, because that machine will not honor any SATA cards either. Apparently, BIOS can analyze hardware from a "class" perspective, and if they are unaware of the class, they won't commission the card and then you can't use it. It's like the bus decode for the slot, does not work, unless the BIOS agrees to it. I would expect somewhat later motherboards, are not as picky.
One other hiccup along the way, was some of the first PCI Express x16 slots, would not "accept" other card types. They would only accept a video card with a GPU on it. You could not stick a SATA or some sort of RAID in those slots. The manufacturer fixed that almost immediately, and a new BIOS treated the big slots in a "more generic" fashion so the detections would work.
No my 256 gb ssd on the motherboard failed, and I had weekly backups to an external normal drive. I opted for a bigger ssd replacement and within the day the guy had it up and running on the new drive, and this is windows 7. I do have Windows 10 on another machine but still find it far too messy and complex for everyday use. Its kind of like buying a lear Jet when you only need a car. I do wish Microsoft would wake up and see what extra money they could make by supporting older hardware that people know how to use without course. Brian
Not very much in terms of the work necessary. MS makes most of its software revenue from the business market, which won't touch old hardware with a bargepole. Most servers are retired when their warranty expires, and a fair number of workstations too.
Windows is pretty much given away to the domestic market, with more money made from advertising and sales of 'telemetry'.
Linux is there for old hardware. I have a fourteen year old netbook which runs the current version of Debian, though this will probably be the last version which will work on a 32 bit machine.
I'm a bit late to this party but a few years ago I cloned an HDD to an SSD and swapped the latter for the former. Then, later, I cloned an SSD for an M.2 SSD, swapping again. And on the rare occasions that I've had a problem with the boot SSD I've swapped it out for a cloned copy. I've had no issues with MS, although sometimes I've been asked if components have been changed. (I use easeUS Todo Backup because its clone facility was free originally but it isn't now.) In your situation I'd partition your new drive into a boot (C:\) sector and a data (D:\) sector, changing the default locations for Documents, Pictures etc., then any issues with the boot sector won't/shouldn't affect the data. Here's a screen cap of my system:
What is the latest thinking about SSD life compared with HDD for active files?
In the early days it was suggested that because of the finite number of writes in a SDD;s life, it was better to stick with HDD for your data. I guess technical advances have made this unnecessary.
However, there are every cheap PCI-e to M.2 NVMe adapter boards which work very nicely in such machines. Booting from an SSD or USB stick and then running the rest of the system from NVMe works well. An NVMe M.2 drive connector is just a subset of the bigger PCI-e connector so the adapters simply pass the signals through and sometimes give some power regulation. John
Pretty much yes. Id use Hard drives in 2 situations - when you need gigabytes and cant afford to remortgage, and when you want to archive, unplug and put in the fire safe.
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