The too-frequent Win10 updates are now taking ages to install and most of the time my hard disk light is on, and not even flashing and task manager shows 100% disk activity. I suppose this could be a sign that the disk has a problem and even though it is lightly used. I don't have massive databases thrashing it all the time. It doesn't log any errors, and control_panel/devices says it is working normally.
It's a WD5000AAKS-00UU3A0 partitioned into C,D,E,and F. Windows on C, most applications on D, but some itinerant ones used the C: drive without asking. Data on E: and F:.
I think I want C+D on an SSD and leave data on the hard disk ?. Backups are on a WD MyCloud device.
Presumably I need to clone the entire disk onto an SSD and then delete the E+F partitions of the SSD and the C+D partitions from the harddisk. What would other people do ?.
My MB does not support M2 so that rules out a PCIe SSD unless I get an adapter card for the existing PCIe slot, but I would rather leave that empty.
Because C and D are so tightly bound anyway, is there any point in having apps on a separate partition ?. I could reinstall everything on the C drive.
Which makes of SSD are the most reliable ?. Are the ones with a 5-year guarantee actually more reliable ?.
As usual, budget may be a factor; as also may be your expected growth in data over the next few years. Subject to that I wonder if you've thought of putting everything on one 500 GB SSD and leaving the hard disk for "in-device" backup. Especially if your current backups are on a /single/ MyCloud device.
I've done something like this. The SSD is just a C drive with standard system and data areas, after cloning the OS and copying over the usual User stuff I reformatted the old drive and set it up as a backup.
Backup/Restore software can have a button for Clone.
There are multiple free backup softwares.
I can get it done with this one, but the interface has a lot of buttons. Install and prepare the Rescue CD, and the clone can be done with the Rescue CD, followed by selecting Boot Repair from the menu.
formatting link
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You shouldn't really need to clone four partitions, delete two, move two partitions to the left. That would be crazy-talk. But if you need to move partitions, that can be done with Paragon Partition Manager 14 Free. The only feature its got, is move/resize anyway. Any other functions are payware.
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The salesman at the store, actually tried to talk me out of my last purchase (860 Pro 500GB). This would be my answer, if I was serving a customer (show a list of TBW).
The one I selected, offers 1200 TBW. You pay more money, for more wear life, that is how the pricing works. QVO are cheap, because the lifetime wear is less. Not all the items were documented to the same extent. I selected the
1TB level in the preparation of this table, so I could find entries from all the families but one (for comparative analysis). The 850 Pro, I bought that some time ago, before most of this table existed.
840 PRO MZ-7PD512 (512 GB) Looks like MLC but not V-NAND, no TBW listed
The warranty does not cover wear. If I take my new drive and do 1200 TBW to it, the flash will be worn out. They can check at the factory and determine the failure is wear-related, then my warranty is void. Using an SSD Toolbox softwsre, some of those show "remaining life" as a percentage. One of my SSDs is 2% used, for example :-) Only 98% remaining.
Both SSD and HDD are (relatively) impervious to sudden power failures. Still, some people seem to have issues on their computers with SSDs and cache flush (even on the most orderly shutdowns), because they find some issues the next time the system starts up with the SSD contents.
Reputable SSD drives should not do that.
Years ago, the firmware inside the SSD drives was terrible. Noteworthy, was when Intel entered the business, they "re-wrote" one of the firmwares, and made it public they were doing so. Which helps explain how the early competing drives used to brick so easily. The power fail resistant SSD drives today, the firmware is much more defensively designed. Just don't torture your drive, OK ? :-) I would not pull the power cord out of the wall a thousand times, to see just how resistant the drive is.
Personally i would not complain that MS is keeping on top of OS patches, the alternative could be far more irritating...
WD "blue" drives are reliable but pretty slow IME - and seem to get more so as they age.
It will depend a little on the existing layout. However cloning the drive and then hacking about with the copy is a resonable way forward since it creates a backup into the process, at least to start with.
M2 NVMe drives are indeed faster (note not all M2 drives are actually NVMe - some are juts SATA in another form factor), however the difference in performance is less noticeable than going from SATA HDD to (resonable quality) SATA SSD. So you should see a worthwhile improvement.
You could - since as you say you would not be able to reformat C, and reload a fresh install of windows and expect the apps to still work, since they will be dependant on many shared libraries, and registry resources that are no longer on C:
However, rather than reinstalling stuff, you could simply tweak the partition sizes to reduce the space on the existing apps partition to reallocated some of the space to the C: partition.
So far I have used:
Kingston SSD Now Mushkin AData Seagate Samsung HyperX Savage HyperX Fury
A few hundred drives in total perhaps...
Of those in the would not touch with a bargepole even if you paid me category I would put Mushkin and AData.
Not used enough Seagate to comment - although I hope its good as that is what my main M2 drive is :-)
Used a ton of the Kington ones - they are generally very reliable, and perform "ok" but not spectacular. (had less than 5 failures in the last ten years say with hundreds in use)
Better still the HyperX ones - very few if any failures (perhaps one questionable drive), and performance is very good - you notice the difference from "ordinary" SSDs.
Best so far, the Samsung - used lots of them - no hint of a failure with any. Performance also very good.
Macrium reflect is not bad. However most SSD makers have their own licensed versions of Acronis or something similar that you can usually download.
Not necessarily - it copies all the bits you need in the process (MBR / GPT partition table etc), and preserves the active partition, keeping the copy fully bootable. If you just copy individual partitions, then that may not be the case.
(also it does not take that long when the target is a SSD)
GParted is free, a does just about anything - just download and make a bootable USB flash drive for it.
This is true, but you need to consider the use case to decide how important that actually is.
For many desktop workloads you are unlikely to get anywhere close to the write limit in the normal lifespan of the machine.
A year or two of very light usage. This cannot be used for characterization purposes. It will last a hundred years, if it just sits on the shelf like it is right now.
If it was my daily driver, it might be closer to 20%.
If all partitions are on the one disc, the real only advantage is that they are easier to find in my experience. There is also usually a hidden part with the windows 10 recovery on it if it was purchased like that but then of course you would need to redownload all the stuff and install it again including updates, so it might be simpler to just clone what you have and have a second drive of the mechanical kind for long term stuff you need offline. As to how you do it, well many pc repairer folk seem to have the tools and do not charge an arm and a leg to do it and you can complain if it does not work. As far as reliability is concerned, I found my original Samsung on mb ssd died after 5 years, a 256gig one, Luckily I did have a complete back up on an external drive, and the new samsung, one of the normal drive emulating kind is both faster and seemingly better, but stil Samsung, which people say is no worse than anyone elses. They will all eventually fail due to too many read write operations, but looking at numbers its going to take a long time, but do not defrag them since this is a sure way to shorten their lives. Defrag the registry files occasionally, but not the files. Brian
A lot of the disc wrangling goes on if your c is quite small be it ssd or normal. Also if you have less than 8 gig of ram expect the updates to be using a disc swap file wich will slow the whole process no end. Brian
I am on Win10/32 PRO so only have 4gig of RAM because I don't want to move to 64bit Windows (yet) while I still use applications that only run on 32 bit windows.
C: partition is 95 GB and only 35GB is used. D: partition is 39 GB and only 4GB used (seems low ??) E: partition is 200GB and 65GB is used. F: partition is 83GB and 58GB is used for copies of various stuff.
I also have a LaCie 250GB external USB hard disk where I keep system backups of C+D, as well as copies on the MyCloud.
But it simply 'works' (for me) and still runs a useful but ageing Nikon slide scanner with a firewire interface, and also a 1998 Epson 1210? flatbed scanner, and a few other things.
The next PC might be an Apple Mac mini with the M1 chip, possibly, but a lot can change over the next 5 years or so before Win10 is retired.
If you're referring to C:\pagefile.sys, no, the Windows 10 OS no longer uses it in exactly the same way as the older OSes.
The OS has a memory compressor.
Using Task Manager, you can use the Memory tab, and one of the fields in there, is a "compressed memory" value. By compressing memory, the pagefile is not needed. I don't even know of a good test case, where I can cause the pagefile to be used in the traditional way. When I tried that, rather than the pagefile being used, I got an "out of RAM" error instead.
The reason the disk light is on for long periods of time, is Windows Update running just after the OS starts. Windows Defender is just finishing its initial scan of "critical resources". And the Search Indexer could potentially be running, depending on how you configured it. By default, it does not Index very much stuff, but it does "twitch" every time the $USN journal receives new entries. Whether a file is created or deleted, the Indexer wants to know about it.
If the system doesn't have enough RAM, the System Read cache doesn't work very well. And that means a lot more disk accesses to get info. But the System Read cache is not relied upon all that much anyway (lots of things "don't trust it", like the defragmenter would never pull content from the read cache and would rather read the disk drive directly). Windows 2000 used to "fly", because lots of stuff trusted that cache back then.
I manually allow Windows to download and install an update and typically a while after powering on and waiting for other stuff to run and stop. I make a point of not doing anything else while windows update is doing its stuff.
No, such a thing does not exist and realistically nor can it (for any OS of any sophistication).
Also remember the attack surface is vastly larger than just the OS, and included any application you might use to access the internet, or open documents.
*nix based systems need patching just as much as windows ones.
It could, but why bother? They will update quicker on the SSD, and this is after all why you bought it...
The wear life limitation is not much of a limitation for a normal desktop workload.
The main 512 GB NVMe SSD I have in this machine is now 235 days old, and in that time the total host write count is 6888 GB. The drive is quoted with a write life of 850 TB, so at the current rate of use of about 30 GB/day it should out live me, never mind the computer! (it may well fail before then - but its probably not going to actually run out of write cycles)
I suspect that for most apps you will find moving to 64 bit windows a non event. The only app compatibility you lose is the ability to run 16 bit code (i.e. old DOS and Win 3.1/95/98/ME applications)
(in reality you can use VMs to run anything on pretty much anything if you need to)
4GB is a bit on the tight side for modern usage unless you don't run much concurrently.
Something to keep in mind with many modern file systems is that their performance tails off when the volume gets close to "full", so fewer larger partitions can make better overall use of space.
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