Tips for installing Windows 10 Pro onto a new NVMe Drive

It may sound like beating a dead horse but from reading numerous posts here and other forums it would probably save time and headaches by disconnecting any other drive in the computer first. After Win10 is running the other drive/s can be added back in for additional storage, I like to wipe such drives so any Operating System on them doesn't interfere. Be sure to protect/save any files you want or that exist nowhere else.

GregH said:

Hello,

I have just acquired a 500GB Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe M.2 2280 SSD. I am wanting to set this up as my boot drive and install Windows 10 x64 Pro. I will do this using the Media Creation Tool, running the Windows setup on a USB.

My question: is there anything specific I should change in the BIOS to make the NVMe perform optimally as a boot drive? Motherboard is MSI XPower Titanium Z170A. It has the most current BIOS.

Thanks!

Make sure it's set to AHCI, rather than RAID... which I've been seeing a lot of lately.

Ghot said:

Make sure it's set to AHCI, rather than RAID... which I've been seeing a lot of lately.

Good point. I had to do a reinstall because of 2 HDDs in a computer [quicker than trying to fix], Win10 picked up the AHCI/RAID setting in the BIOS and when I removed the second/D: drive it broke the booting process.

Berton said:

Good point. I had to do a reinstall because of 2 HDDs in a computer [quicker than trying to fix], Win10 picked up the AHCI/RAID setting in the BIOS and when I removed the second/D: drive it broke the booting process.

Almost did that myself on this build. It was set to RAID by default. :/


The other thing I manually set was for legacy BIOS, cause I wanted MBR partitions. Most boards I've seen are set to UEFI by default, but it's worth checking.

If you're installing on to a fast NVME, it will pay you to get a usb 3 memory stick to make the installation even faster.

GregH said:

Thanks, great info, will definitely save me some headaches. On the UEFI vs Legacy, which is best for performance? I thought UEFI was the best (modern) option. I am not planning to partition this NVMe drive, other than the default partitions that the Windows installation creates automatically.

I don't see any difference between the two as far as performance is concerned but drive size is important, Legacy/MBR has a limit of 2GB, UEFI is more. And that limit is for the boot drive, USB drives aren't as susceptible, I have 2 x 4TB connected and formatted as NTFS. They came as exFAT but since my MacBook Pro died I didn't need that.