New Build

"Bob F" wrote in message
...
On 12/20/2020 7:52 AM, SC Tom wrote:


"SC Tom" wrote in message ...
snip

As suggested by Bill and Larc, I got an SSD (Samsung 860 EVO 1GB) and
replaced my system HDD with it yesterday afternoon. I must admit, the
boot time is pretty impressive, although that's never been a problem for
me- I turn it on, make coffee, and it's all finished booting before I get
back to it. Now, it's almost through booting up before I can get my robe
on and leave the room :-)

Transferring my OS over to the SSD proved to be a little more difficult
than I originally thought. I installed the latest free version of
MiniTool Partition Wizard and saw the "Migrate OS to SSD/HD Wizard" and
figured that would be pretty cool. But when I went to use it, I was
informed that it was only available in the paid (subscription) version.
So I forked over the US$59 and DL'd and installed it. Hooked up my SSD,
started the transfer, and after ~3.5 hours, it was done. Shut down the
PC, disconnected my C: HDD, plugged in the SSD, turned it on, and it
booted right up, no problem . . . until about 3 minutes in. Suddenly, the
dreaded BSOD popped up with a "Attempted switch from DPC" error. OK, what
the hell is this? Did a search from my laptop and found out it could be
most anything from a driver issue to an antivirus issue. Rebooted and
have had no issue since (knock on wood).

The system seems to more responsive now than before. My video editor is
quicker and smoother, so that's a definite plus. The games that I have
that are high-def and huge start up quicker, and the game play is much
more responsive and smoother. So, all in all, I would that installing an
SSD is a definite plus and improvement over my HDD.

side note- I registered my SSD and looked at the Download section and
didn't see much of anything other than Samsung Magician, which seems to
be mainly a maintenance and information app. But, searching later on
through Google, I found out that Samsung has a System Migration app. Of
course, that was after I had already bought Partition Wizard. Could have
accomplished the same results for free if I hadn't been in such a hurry
:-(

Thanks for everyone's input. I'll put off buying the new components until
I get tired of this set up :-)

Stepping to NVME makes a similar difference.

As I stated in a previous post, my current MB (BioStar A68MD Pro) doesn't
support M.2. If I do decide sometime to go ahead and upgrade, most likely
any decent newer MB will support it :-)

"Bob F" wrote in message

Stepping to NVME makes a similar difference.

How about the difference between NVMe and SATA3.

Does the NVMe run on a faster bus, or are these pretty much the same?
I recall reading something about a (newer) 4th generation bus.
NVMe seems like a convenient choice now, if only for the slight
additional simplicity (absence of wires).

Bill

Bill wrote:

"Bob F" wrote in message

Stepping to NVME makes a similar difference.

How about the difference between NVMe and SATA3.

Does the NVMe run on a faster bus, or are these pretty much the same?
I recall reading something about a (newer) 4th generation bus.
NVMe seems like a convenient choice now, if only for the slight
additional simplicity (absence of wires).

Bill

NVMe in the performant cases, is using PCI Express.
In a sense, it's a direct wiring to the bus hub on
the machine. Soon, PCI Express Rev5 will ship, and
then we'll see whether actual RAM performance can keep
up (not throttle) a fresh new design NVMe with PCIe Rev5.

Which is why the rate of advancement in data rate is
there. It rides PCI Express coattails.

It also allows relatively easy interconnect to the
chipset, because the chipset already needs to run
bus connections for expansion slots. And an NVMe tray
can be wired just as easily as a PCI Express x4 slot.

You can also put NVMe modules on carrier cards, in
your graphics card slot. One of the first carriers
was a rather powerful contraption, whose concept is
still useful today.

PCIe Rev 2 x16 --- PLEX switch chip --- PCI3 Rev 3 x4
--- PCI3 Rev 3 x4
--- PCI3 Rev 3 x4
--- PCI3 Rev 3 x4

In that made-up example, it's to indicate that you can
take slower lanes from an older system, and using a
switch chip, do rate adaptation to a higher rate and
talk to individual NVMe drives. The carrier card
would have four sites to screw down NVMe drives. And
you could, say, access one drive as a source, a second
drive as a destination, and get the newer NVMe module
to run at full speed on an older computer. Older
computers still have RAM speed as a consideration, and
if a program is running, the NVMe activity and the
program running, are both using up RAM bandwidth on
the RAM end of the picture.

The problem with using carriers for NVMe, is you
can't boot from them. Only a modern motherboard
with the NVMe discovery module, is going to notice
an NVMe is sitting in a PCI Express slot and register
an INT 0x13 routine for read at boot. That sort of
thing. I don't know the details of how that works,
but all an older computer user can expect from
NVMe, is data disk usage, rather than OS partition usage.
If you had a newer motherboard, you could screw an NVMe
to the motherboard surface, but also install a carrier
card with four more NVMe drives. And all would be bootable.

Paul

Top-posting.

Paul, Thank you for explaining some of the details.
It will be "fun" to see what NVME and PCIe version 5 brings!

Bill




Paul wrote:
Bill wrote:

"Bob F" wrote in message

Stepping to NVME makes a similar difference.

How about the difference between NVMe and SATA3.

Does the NVMe run on a faster bus, or are these pretty much the same?
I recall reading something about a (newer) 4th generation bus.
NVMe seems like aÂ* convenient choice now, if only for the slight
additional simplicity (absence of wires).

Bill

NVMe in the performant cases, is using PCI Express.
In a sense, it's a direct wiring to the bus hub on
the machine. Soon, PCI Express Rev5 will ship, and
then we'll see whether actual RAM performance can keep
up (not throttle) a fresh new design NVMe with PCIe Rev5.

Which is why the rate of advancement in data rate is
there. It rides PCI Express coattails.

It also allows relatively easy interconnect to the
chipset, because the chipset already needs to run
bus connections for expansion slots. And an NVMe tray
can be wired just as easily as a PCI Express x4 slot.

You can also put NVMe modules on carrier cards, in
your graphics card slot. One of the first carriers
was a rather powerful contraption, whose concept is
still useful today.

Â*Â* PCIe Rev 2 x16 --- PLEX switch chip --- PCI3 Rev 3 x4
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* --- PCI3 Rev 3 x4
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* --- PCI3 Rev 3 x4
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* --- PCI3 Rev 3 x4

In that made-up example, it's to indicate that you can
take slower lanes from an older system, and using a
switch chip, do rate adaptation to a higher rate and
talk to individual NVMe drives. The carrier card
would have four sites to screw down NVMe drives. And
you could, say, access one drive as a source, a second
drive as a destination, and get the newer NVMe module
to run at full speed on an older computer. Older
computers still have RAM speed as a consideration, and
if a program is running, the NVMe activity and the
program running, are both using up RAM bandwidth on
the RAM end of the picture.

The problem with using carriers for NVMe, is you
can't boot from them. Only a modern motherboard
with the NVMe discovery module, is going to notice
an NVMe is sitting in a PCI Express slot and register
an INT 0x13 routine for read at boot. That sort of
thing. I don't know the details of how that works,
but all an older computer user can expect from
NVMe, is data disk usage, rather than OS partition usage.
If you had a newer motherboard, you could screw an NVMe
to the motherboard surface, but also install a carrier
card with four more NVMe drives. And all would be bootable.

Â*Â* Paul

On Fri, 1 Jan 2021 17:40:38 -0800, Bob F wrote:

On 12/17/2020 12:30 PM, Larc wrote:
On Thu, 17 Dec 2020 13:26:25 -0500, "SC Tom" wrote:

| I decided to give an SSD a chance on my current PC (I haven't bought the
| components yet for my "wish" PC). I can't get an NVMe since my current MB
| doesn't have an M.2 slot for it. I ordered a 1GB Samsung 860 EVO. Has good
| reviews, and is plenty big enough to hold everything that's on my HDD.
| I own Acronis True Image- I should be able to clone from one to the other
| with that. Worse comes to worst, I'll just create an image of my HDD, remove
| it, put the SSD in, and restore that image to it. Been there, done that with
| HDD's; can't imagine it being too different with SSD's.
| I also have older free versions of Macrium Reflect and MTPW; I guess I could
| download the newest and make bootable CD/DVD from them (that's how I used my
| old versions, and my newer ATI).

NVMe SSD is much faster than SATA SSD. Samsung 970 EVO Plus sequential read/write
speeds are up to 3500/3300 MBs per second compared to 550/520 MBs for the Samsung 860
EVO.

I haven't had any luck using an image file to transfer a system drive from HDD to
SATA SSD or from SATA SSD to NVMe SSD. Since they are different types of drives,
they seem to need the clone option to deal with those differences.


I've used the free versions of Acronis many times with no problem.

I used EaseUS ToDo Backup (free version) to clone from HDD to SATA
SSD, then to M.2 SATA SSD and then to NVMe SSD.

"SC Tom" wrote in message ...


"SC Tom" wrote in message ...
snip

side note- I registered my SSD and looked at the Download section and
didn't see much of anything other than Samsung Magician, which seems to be
mainly a maintenance and information app. But, searching later on through
Google, I found out that Samsung has a System Migration app. Of course,
that was after I had already bought Partition Wizard. Could have
accomplished the same results for free if I hadn't been in such a hurry
:-(

Thanks for everyone's input. I'll put off buying the new components until
I get tired of this set up :-)

As a side note to the side note:

I was so impressed with the improvement that the SSD made to my desktop that
I bought an EVO 500GB for my laptop. It's an 8YO Acer V3-731 that came with
Win7Pro, but has been upgraded over the years to Win10Pro. It has 2 HDD
slots, so I put the SSD in slot1 (C: is slot0), ran the Samsung System
Migration program, and after ~35 minutes, the laptop shut itself down (it's
supposed to do that). Swapped the EVO into slot0, booted up, and it was like
nothing had changed except for the less than a minute boot time (instead of
the usual 3-5 minutes), and the improved responsiveness and overall speed.
Marvelous!
I reformatted the HDD and put it in slot1 for extra storage, and as a home
for some stuff I access on an irregular basis.

It's like I got 2 new computers for $250US (including the cost of Partition
Wizard)!
Thanks to everyone for their input and suggestions! Now if I could just do
that to my internal computer, I'd really be one happy camper, LOL!
--

SC Tom