Yay I got an SSD drive for Xmas.....er WHAT do I do with it?

I, like alot of people, have been hearing about SSD drives for a while now but I've not had the money to get one as they always seemed to be way too expensive for me. However I have tried to keep up with the technology and how it's been changing and have seen recently that the standard SATA SSD drives have come down quite a bit in price with the whole newer QLC thing and the newer M.2 form factor starting off being a bit cheaper to start with and if you have the space and money and a decent motherboard you can get an incredible speed boost over even SATA SSD Drives.....etc....etc....

In any case I was lucky enough to get a 512GB SATA SSD for xmas and got pretty excited as I have only some, what I would call "upper middle class" HDD's right now and I have a few games that are VERY R/W intensive especially when starting up and would like to be able to use it to speed those up since I figure i'm looking at a 5-6x R/W speed increase if i'm lucky.

My dilemma now is, what EXACTLY should I do with it, being the first SSD going into my system? Because in all the things I've read about SSD's I don't remember exactly any definitive information about how to put it in and what it should be replacing.

I've heard discussion about using it as a replacement for my C: drive for the OS, and also people saying they use it as a replacement or temporary location for games that I want to speed up that I currently play alot of. To me as I do have a fairly extensive background with hardware installation and troubleshooting that the concept of replacing it as my main OS drive, and then putting some of the slowest loading/current games I am playing on it. But I don't know this from any information i've read about how SSD's work other than my intuition about how they work currently and how much you want to fill them and/or not fill them up.

Right now I am on Win10 Ver 1909 which is running stable for me. An Asus ROG Maximus Hero VI motherboard. I'm currently working with about 650-700GB full on my C: Drive, but I'm fairly certain a big chunk of that can be removed as it is probably media files from back when I only had one HDD and I just need to move it to another drive or delete it. One of the main games I am playing right now is Witcher 3 again, which windows tells me is aprox 50GB, and also Conan Exiles, which is one of my longer loading games and comes in at about 77GB right now.

I got a Addlink S22 QLC 512GB SSD drive so I'm trying to best organize myself to be able to put Win 10 and at least one of the games I play on that drive if possible. I suppose I wont really know for certain until I clean out the extra stuff on my C: drive for sure. I don't want to go over what I believe is the recommended 80% full status of the SSD if possible.

So what i'm primarily wondering is the idea that probably at least putting my whole OS on the SSD is a given and hopefully I have enough room for one or two of my games I play frequently, or if I can't put a game on there I want, would I get the same kind of speed increase from putting it in as another storage drive and using it to run any of the games I want to speed up from there and leave the OS on the HDD for now? Since i'm not super familiar with all the concepts about the little details about how SSD's work in a system I'm thinking someone else who knows more may have a better opinion on all this.

Also if someone can tell me what is a good free cloning program to use if I do decided to make it a replacement OS drive that would be good also. And if anyone knows of some good software that helps you keep track of the health of an SSD and make sure your using it in the best possible manner from a longevity point of view also. I know Win10 from what i've been told is fairly good at understanding the difference between an SSD and a HDD and it apparently knows how to handle both in the correct manner but I don't know that from firsthand information or experience.

I have attached a simple CPUID text report in case anyone needs to see any other details about my system to make an informed recommendation.
Thank you for any help in this area that people can think of.
P.S. My apologies for this post being very long winded and rambling. I have ADD and Hepatic Encephalopathy, and it makes my brain very forgetful and makes me feel like I have to talk everything I'm thinking out so that people understand where I am coming from.

That looks a pretty decent machine. An ssd should be a noticeable boost. There must be some gamers that can advise what it is best used for.

Plenty of free programs can do a clone - aomei, easeus, macrium, diskgenius, paragon and more.

Aomei pro is on free giveaway atm

Where to begin?

Okay, the first thing to know is that to you, as the user, when you install an SSD, it won't really look any different than any other HD. The only real noticable difference will be the speed - oh what beautiful speed!

Where or how you want to use it is really a user preference. If your biggest concern is really fast start times, then use it as the operating system drive. If you other tasks that could really benefit from some extra speed, then use it there. Where you would see the least benfit is in places where all you are doing is storing data and speed means nothing.

Some examples:

Storing things like music or video are probably not a great use case for an SSD because that is simply static data and when you play it back there's no benefit to really fast access. You only need to read the data fast enough to play the media and that is not very intensive at all, even for a spinning disk. For this type of data storage, a HD is just as good (and more cost efficient!).

One place I use an SSD is when I'm running multiple virtual machines at a time. Running multiple VMs on a single HD can be painfully slow because the heads on the HD have to jump around like crazy servicing data that is not in contiguous locations on the disk. I get HUGE speed increases using an SSD.

Basically, anything doing a lot of random reads and writes can benefit greatly from an SSD. Even if it's not so random, but just a lot of data, that will benefit.

Some things to be aware with SSDs:

They do have a limited life span. Don't let that worry you - for the average user a typical SSD will last many years. For example, if an SSD has a rated lifespan of 200 TBW (TerraBytes Written), that would take you over 5 years to use if you wrote 100GB per day to the disk. NOTE: 200 TBW is just an example, some SSDs have far higher rated lifespans, some less. So, normally, this is not a huge concern, just be aware of it.

Another thing to note: SSDs work best when they are not stuffed completely full. Unlike a HD, you cannot simply overwrite a block of data with new data. The SSD first has to erase the block, then rewrite any old data back to that block along with anything that may have changed. That slows things down. To work around this, the SSD will try to use empty blocks first that it has already pre-erased (see the article regarding TRIM support below). Related to this is the fact that, as noted, each block can only be written to so many times. In an effort to spead the writes out evenly, the SSD employs a "wear leveling technology" that aims to sread the writes out evenly among blocks. All of what I have described works best when the SSD has some free space to work with with writting new data to and for moving around existing blocks of data.

If you do decide to place the OS on the SSD, you will find a lot of fans of Macrium Reflect here. There is a free version available and a lot of people here are familiar with it and recommend it.

Some links that may help you:

SSD vs Hard Drive
Enable or Disable TRIM Support for Solid State Drives in Windows 10
Optimize Performance of Windows 10
Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect

SSD changed ny start up from 45 seconds to 15 seconds on a I7 ifyou putting in in a desktop you may need an adapter as its a small size drive

Decent programs to monitor hardware, temps, SSDs, etc:

Speccy from piriform.com

HWinfo 64 from hwinfo.com

Cloning and imaging:

Macrium Reflect Free Edition

Aomei Backupper


You state "tell me what is a good free cloning program to use if I do decided to make it a replacement OS drive that would be good also". I wouldn't make an outright replacement drive that is ready to be attached to cables and boot your PC. I'd instead think of making an image file of all the partitions on your OS drive---that could later be "restored" and make a hard drive bootable, within a half hour or so. Imaging as opposed to cloning.

I would NOT pay any particular attention to SSD longevity other than to not defragment it. If you must obsess over something, take an occasional look at the total terabytes written to the drive. It's very unlikely that the total will ever be high enough to be a concern. You might try to find the TBW rating for your particular SSD----I think it has a TBW rating of 240 terabytes and a 3 year warranty. HWInfo keeps track of total writes.

Here's a review of your SSD. It's referred to as "a budget wonder", so apparently a decent choice.

Addlink S22 QLC SSD review: Quad-level cell NAND that sustains write speeds, on the cheap | PCWorld

hsehestedt said:

Where to begin?

Okay, the first thing to know is that to you, as the user, when you install an SSD, it won't really look any different than any other HD. The only real noticable difference will be the speed - oh what beautiful speed!

Where or how you want to use it is really a user preference. If your biggest concern is really fast start times, then use it as the operating system drive. If you other tasks that could really benefit from some extra speed, then use it there. Where you would see the least benfit is in places where all you are doing is storing data and speed means nothing.

Storing things like music or video are probably not a great use case for an SSD because that is simply static data and when you play it back there's no benefit to really fast access. You only need to read the data fast enough to play the media and that is not very intensive at all, even for a spinning disk. For this type of data storage, a HD is just as good (and more cost efficient!).

Basically, anything doing a lot of random reads and writes can benefit greatly from an SSD. Even if it's not so random, but just a lot of data, that will benefit.

Some things to be aware with SSDs:

They do have a limited life span. Don't let that worry you - for the average user a typical SSD will last many years. For example, if an SSD has a rated lifespan of 200 TBW (TerraBytes Written), that would take you over 5 years to use if you wrote 100GB per day to the disk. NOTE: 200 TBW is just an example, some SSDs have far higher rated lifespans, some less. So, normally, this is not a huge concern, just be aware of it.

Another thing to note: SSDs work best when they are not stuffed completely full. Unlike a HD, you cannot simply overwrite a block of data with new data. The SSD first has to erase the block, then rewrite any old data back to that block along with anything that may have changed. That slows things down. To work around this, the SSD will try to use empty blocks first that it has already pre-erased (see the article regarding TRIM support below). Related to this is the fact that, as noted, each block can only be written to so many times. In an effort to spead the writes out evenly, the SSD employs a "wear leveling technology" that aims to sread the writes out evenly among blocks. All of what I have described works best when the SSD has some free space to work with with writting new data to and for moving around existing blocks of data.

If you do decide to place the OS on the SSD, you will find a lot of fans of Macrium Reflect here. There is a free version available and a lot of people here are familiar with it and recommend it.

Yea alot of what you said I have already been able to find in my reading about SSD's and how they work, but it's good to hear it confirmed from someone in here, and yea I figure the SSD is best used either as a replacement for my OS drive, not to speed up boot times <I'm old school and still feel that leaving the PC on 24/7 gives Windows a good long chance with the computer being idle to do whatever maintenance filekeeping it feels like it needs to do, so that if possible, it's not trying to do something while I'm trying to use it, ESPECIALLY when playing a game. :)> but to help OS and other software updates complete and process faster so I don't have to endure too much thumb twiddling during updates, especially windows updates as it seems like it's about a 50/50 prospect weather an update will be a few mins, or something you may as well go to a restaurant and get a meal and come back and then it will be done. :)

And same with large files, even though in the review they talk about how fast the drive was in testing transfer speeds with files up to 45GB's, I did read somewhere else also what you said that you get the most benefit when the system is trying to read and/or write smaller files faster, such as the OS running, or playing a game where most games want to read alot of smaller files when you first load into a save game, and then while your playing to load new areas and graphics for those areas.

The PCWorld review says the drive is rated at 240TBW per 512GB in size, and the website itself the best I could find is that it's rated at "Two million hours reliability" Which in reading about the various metrics that can be used, the 2 Million hours reliability thing is an extremely vague way to rate a SSD, The TBW rating tells more of the story, but it's still not the BEST way to rate a SSD, and that you really need to look at a few different ratings together to tell how much usage you should be able to get out of the drive in general. <TBW, DWPD, UBER, Etc....> I would be interested in you or anyone else taking a look at this information on the Wikepedia page about "SSD Reliability and Failure Modes" And offer an opinion about how much you may agree or disagree with the information presented there. It also appears the information is from aprox 4 years ago, and I know 4 years can be a lifetime in computer technology so i'd be interested if anyone knows of any more updated information than what is presented here. Solid-state drive - Wikipedia

Other than that it seems like i'm going to want to try to use the SSD as a replacement OS drive, and hopefully get rid of enough files to be able to put at least one or maybe two of my games I play the most often right now on there. Also thanks for the links. They added to my Windows knowledge <FFS I dident even KNOW about ReFS or the Storage Space Features on Windows. LOL>

Thanks for the ideas and help to everyone who replied. It's 6am and I am falling asleep at my keyboard right now so I wanted to make sure I say that in here somewhere. :)

- - - Updated - - -

ignatzatsonic said:

You state "tell me what is a good free cloning program to use if I do decided to make it a replacement OS drive that would be good also". I wouldn't make an outright replacement drive that is ready to be attached to cables and boot your PC. I'd instead think of making an image file of all the partitions on your OS drive---that could later be "restored" and make a hard drive bootable, within a half hour or so. Imaging as opposed to cloning.

Yea I was a bit confused by this part of your reply, thinking somehow you were telling me not to use the SSD as the main OS drive, but to use it as a OS backup drive, which would kind of defeat the purpose of putting in the SSD to speed up my system, other than making a backup of my OS that could be updated and recovered from faster. LOL

I think the confusion is from the fact that I didn't understand that there is a difference between "cloneing" and "imaging" or "mirroring" the HDD. Basically what I'm wanting to do is move the whole OS, system boot sectors and files and everything, to the SSD and then using that as the OS drive, then I would probably switch the existing C: to being just another storage drive for things. One of my drives is getting a bit older and is a bit slower one and has started developing some R/W errors but I did do a repair on it and it's seemed to work fine for quite a while longer just as a storage drive, but i'm sure it's just a mater of time before it fails in a more serious way and I'm going to start loosing some data so being able to use the old C: drive to replace it sounds like a good idea.

Let me know if my terminology is still a bit confused here so at least I use the right commands when i'm looking at a cloning/imaging/mirroring/whatever program here so I don't shoot myself in the foot from the first step. LOL

Thanks for the info.

Cloning is directly copying the contents and state of one drive to another. Both drives are connected to the PC at the same time. Some SSDs come with free cloning software.

Imaging is creating an image (in a single file) of a drive or partition. That can be used as a backup in case something goes very wrong with the source drive (corrupt OS, ransomware, etc). You should already be doing that as a backup strategy. The image may also be restored to an entirely different drive. I have used Acronis True Image (commercial) to save an image of a drive onto another drive in the system. True Image allows creation of a bootable USB drive, which I used to restore the image to a different SSD. That offers the advantage of not needing to have old and new drives installed at the same time.

I'm unsure about "mirroring", unless you're referring to RAID 1. That uses two drives, which hold the same data. The redundancy saves data if one of the drives fails. It's not relevant to replacing an HD with an SSD.

rangervegas said:

Yea I was a bit confused by this part of your reply, thinking somehow you were telling me not to use the SSD as the main OS drive, but to use it as a OS backup drive....................Let me know if my terminology is still a bit confused here so at least I use the right commands when i'm looking at a cloning/imaging/mirroring/whatever program here so I don't shoot myself in the foot from the first step.

I think we were both a bit confused.

Yes, there is a difference between cloning and imaging, as explained by Bob. Cloning has a specific meaning, but is often tossed around in a more general way. If you want to "copy" your current boot drive's contents onto a new SSD, you could use EITHER cloning or imaging. Most programs that can do one can also do the other. Cloning is often used in cases such as yours where the user simply wants to move to a new or larger drive, when the PC is operating well. Imaging is more often seen as a "disaster recovery" or "backup" strategy. Anecdotally, imaging seems to be a bit more trouble-free.

Imaging is a 2 step process: make an image of certain partitions and then restore some or all of them immediately, or a day, month, or year later. Cloning is a 1 step process---the ENTIRE source drive is replicated onto a second drive right now.

I was confused because you had said "good free cloning program to use if I do decided to make it a replacement OS drive". I (apparently incorrectly) assumed you meant you were NOT considering making the SSD your "OS drive" right away, but instead were considering using it as a "spare" ready-to-go replacement OS drive that would sit in your closet until you wanted to actually use it. The word "replacement" threw me off.

Even if you clone (rather than image) to get the SSD going as an OS drive, you should certainly use imaging to back up its partitions as a longer-term strategy.

ignatzatsonic said:

Even if you clone (rather than image) to get the SSD going as an OS drive, you should certainly use imaging to back up its partitions as a longer-term strategy.

Yea I think we're both on the same page now. And originally at first I WAS considering it as just a extra drive I wanted to put some of my games on so they would load and run more quickly. But it seemed pretty evident after reading the information in this thread that I'd probably be best served to us it as a replacement OS drive and hope I can still have enough room left to put a few of my games on there so I'm getting a speed increase from both ends as it were. I've never imaged my drives before, I always seem to have more info I want to image than I have spare HDD space for. But it seems like in clearing out the existing C: to get the size down to just the OS itself, it would also make it alot easier to use the old C: after I replace it with the SSD, to make an image of the OS itself from the SSD in case of serious issues. And since the size of the OS on the SSD should be relatively small by that point, I'd still have space left on the old C: for some data storage also.

I'm still curious about peoples opinion of that section from the Wikipedia page about SSD's and failure rates and such. Especially the part about

"Bad blocks in new SSDs are common, and drives with a large number of bad blocks are much more likely to lose hundreds of other blocks, most likely due to die or chip failure. 30-80 percent of SSDs develop at least one bad block and 2-7 percent develop at least one bad chip in the first four years of deployment."

This "Most SSDs develop no more than a few bad blocks, perhaps 2 - 4. SSDs that develop many bad blocks often go on to develop far more (perhaps hundreds), and may be prone to failure. However most drives (99%+) are shipped with bad blocks from manufacture. The finding overall was that bad blocks are common and 30-80% of drives will develop at least one in use, but even a few bad blocks (2 - 4) is a predictor of up to hundreds of bad blocks at a later time. The bad block count at manufacture correlates with later development of further bad blocks. The report conclusion added that SSDs tended to either have "less than a handful" of bad blocks or "a large number", and suggested that this might be a basis for predicting eventual failure."

and this "Device age, measured by days in use, is the main factor in SSD reliability, and not amount of data read or written, which are measured by TBW or DWPD. Because this finding persists after controlling for early failure and other factors, it is likely that factors such as "silicon aging" is a cause of this trend. The correlation is significant (around 0.2 - 0.4)."

So all of this makes me think, "Run the Win10 drive check right from the start to see how many bad sectors/blocks the drive comes up with before even thinking about using it." and also that it might not be a good idea to leave my PC on 24/7 anymore.

As I said this is information from 2016 as far as I can tell and i'm going to try to find some newer information considering changes in technology but i'd be curious as to peoples opinions about this.

Also I was thinking about marking this thread as "Solved" as I've gotten the main information I wanted from everyone who's been helping, but I can't remember if marking it solved also closes it to replies so I wanted to leave it open till I get some more opinions about those things.

Thank You

I have only been using SSDs for about 5 years. (Began with 128 GB drives, at around $1US/GB.) None have failed.

None also have showed bad sectors under chkdsk. I'm not expert on SSDs, but I believe that their controllers are set up to make bad cells invisible to the OS. Whether that is one of the features that drives overprovisioning (putting more space in the drive than is made available to the OS), I'm not sure.

Considering the performance pluses of SSDs, it may be unreasonable to be compulsive about reliability issues. Especially since SSDs can now be had for about 10¢ per gigabyte.