PC Upgrade Time

[Paragon Fury]

So this week will be the first part of two to upgrading my PC. I'm almost ready; I'm should be ordering the first two things I'm upgrading - my HDD and OS - on Weds. and will be putting them in the Monday after.

Currently I have two 1TB HDDs - I currently only use about 460GB of one though. So I'm going to replace one of them with a 500GB Solid State Drive instead. Because I'll take "What are load times and how can I skip them?" for $240 Mr. Trebek (especially when it comes to Battlefield and Skyrim). I'm definitely NOT looking forward AT ALL to re-installing and re-downloading everything though. That ain't gonna be fun.

The second part will probably be in December, when I'll be replacing my GPUs with a stronger, single GPU.

But just to make sure I don't go messing up my new HDD install; this is the HDD I'm going/want to order:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E3W19MO/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

(Yes, Amazon IS the cheapest place to get it. Lower price and I don't pay shipping from them)

I want to make sure it will actually go INTO my computer. Here is a picture I took while cleaning my room earlier today of how my HDDs go into my computer currently.

Spoiler

 

[SnowyGamester]

I believe all newly produced hard drives (and SSDs) us the SATA connection so it will definitely be compatible. The issue may be with how it actually fits into your computer. The vast majority of SSDs, that one included, are in the 2.5" form factor, while your desktop is designed for mounting 3.5" drives. Many SSDs come with a mounting bracket however this one doesn't appear to so you may need to buy one separately.

Also it may be possible to copy the contents of your current drive to the new drive when you get it to avoid having to redo everything. You would need to shrink the partition so it is smaller than the new drive (may require moving unnecessary files to your secondary drive and/or defragging to allow enough room to shrink) then image it to the new drive via CloneZilla, DriveXML or whatever. I like to use DriveXML however it doesn't copy the boot manager properly so I use Macrium Rescue PE to repair it afterwards. It's a bit of a pain but if you don't have much reason to do a reinstall it would be a shorter process.

 

[Paragon Fury]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002BH3Z8E/ref=s9_simh_gw_p147_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0YQ0ZE5HXF03VGT7N7FX&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1688200382&pf_rd_i=507846

So would that be what I need to make sure it mounts right in my computer?

 

[SnowyGamester]

Yup. That'd do it.

 

[Laughing Man]

The ports on the drive are the same but the form factor is much much smaller. You can go for the caddy you listed to make it fit in the existing drive bay however the drive itself is so small and light if you can route the cables to other locations in your system you could quite literally double side tape the drive to anywhere inside your computer, that's what I plan to do with my new drive.

Yup I am in the same boat as you having just took delivery of a 1TB version of the same drive, designed to replace my ageing 2x1Tb Raid 0 drives. I also happened to get my drive from Amazon as it too was far and away the cheapest option.

On a side note this may be of interest to you given it's the affected drive model you have purchased. It's regarding a firmware fix for the Evo 840 drives that resolves a performance slow down issue that affects the drive over time.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=393817

I plan to install my OS on my smaller Kingston SSD, do the key driver installs and then run the software / firmware update on the Samsung 1Tb drive before I stick ANY of my data on the drive.