Upgrading Hard Drive

[crudo]

This should be fairly simple to do but I don't want to booger it up.  When I built my computer I wanted an SSD for storage and it's been great.  However it was one of the things I budgeted on to save money and it's far too small for gaming.  I would like to upgrade my hard drive to a new and larger SSD but I'm not 100% certain of the steps I need to follow.  I did some research and I understand that there is a "mirror" command for backing up the system through Windows but I'm not certain of the connection, how do I connect the new drive to the PC for the transfer.  Are there any particular cables or other tools I may need?  Any thoughts?  Thanks in advance if you can help.

[MadMansGun]

it's better to do a clean OS install, hard drive cloning tends to do odd and unpredictable things.

copy your files onto a external hard drive/memory stick, or get an adapter to turn your old hard drive into one.

[xwhiteninjax]

ssd for storage is an overkill for sure... especially if there is a lot of writing, deleting, writing again, with little files to great ones...

ssd's are for the operating-system, to start it faster as the normal ones (much cheaper, more lifetime, bigger - but usually slower)... ssd for a gaming-partition or a complete hdd for gaming is ok, if the savegames or other continually produces little files are stored elsewhere...

 

since you have one ssd already inside the computer it should be easy to put a second one into it, too... most boards capable of using a ssd have two ports for them... buying a ssd should be deliver the needed cables, too... one for the datatransfer, the other for the power...

 

the capacity for a gaming ssd depends on your used/planned games... a heavy modded skyrim has likely over 300 k files and maybe 300 GB to play with, so the capacity should be 512 GB or more... since the prize for this range is imho acceptable (greater capacity is much more on the money-side) it make sense to fasten the responding-time for gaming with a ssd, too (or a nvmm2-type - a card like ram... as fast as a ssd or faster)... fi the board is capable of handling this kind of hdd, it would make much more sense to use this type of hdd for gaming... the prize is equal to a ssd-drive...

 

backups, storage is the domain for the 2,5 " Sata-hdd or 3,5"-hdd... slower but the speed is ok for all usage... even a modern usb 3.0 or 3.1 hdd would be better for "storage" or backups...

 

hope, this will help a little bit

[polonius]

Is your OS on the SSD? That is definitely worth a SSD drive. But for Skyrim it didn't seem worth it at least with 1k/2k textures. Hoping for instant cell changes I never noticed a thing. I'm running as many 4k/8k textures as I can get my hands on now and the beast doesn't hiccup, so that might have been a decent investment, but I have no baseline. You can just move the game drive in Steam. What OS are you using and do you have the space for another drive? Need more details.

[crudo]

Thanks for all the replies so far, I have one SSD as my only drive and it's capacity is 232 GB running Windows 10.  Right now I have Skyrim (oldrim), Fallout 4 and Fallout 3.  I had Fallout New Vegas as well but recently removed it to make space.  All have been modded to different degrees, Skyrim being the most overhauled.  Windows currently can't update for lack of space.  I knew the drive would cause issues eventually but until this recent Windows update it's been okay.

 

One of the reasons I wanted to keep everything on one drive and not add another is there is something about permissions for Nexus Mod Manager and being able to run a game... sorry if that seems really vague as I don't recall the exact potential problem it's just that everything is running so smooth except for the lack of space that I don't want to mess it up.  I'm not a tech genius by any stretch but I can usually figure stuff out with enough research.

 

Would it make more sense to get another SSD and store the games on that and keep my current SSD as an OS only drive?  Will migrating the game files and mod files to a new drive cause problems?

[Storms of Superior]

Any Bethesda game doesn't migrate well. I've tried with Skyrim. It just doesn't work after trying.

 

A better solution than migrating games is to install them on the new drive to keep them separated from your OS, and then try migrating your mod manager (MO works well in this case; copy&paste the MO folder) to the new drive so your rig doesn't have to read from two different drives to run everything (I tried that too, doesn't work well for me).

[polonius]

Yeah, you need more space so get the games off your OS drive. I think I did a clean install on Skyrim when I moved it to a SSD which you need to do too often with NMM anyway. Steam does support multiple drives well though, Skyrim is on SSD and the rest of the them are on the HDD for me. My slightly modded FO4 is 100GB and heavily modded Skyrim another 100GB so they can eat a lot of drive space. Mod Organizer doesn't care, I'm sure NMM can be moved if you can change every single file path to the new drive.