Just trying to give you a heads up, I have yet to see a SSD stand up to the day to day use of OS for more than a few months. As for wanting your OS on the fastest drive possible thats not needed, anything your OS is going to use such as DX files and such are going to cashe in your RAM they are not access over and over during game play just at loadup. Where your bottleneck comes from in gaming is accessing texture and graphic flles used by the game when your loading new content such as zoning or chunking. This is where the SSD drive will speed up your game play but if your thinking your computer is going to be some how faster because your adding your OS to the SSD then your going to be sadly disappointed. The only improvement your going to see is maybe a half second less delay when your load up a program.
Unless your HD is ancient and your running Win98 the performance you think your going to get from putting your OS on the SSD is going to be lacking. It will however end up burning up the SSD from constant access through Indexing, File management, and basic OS functions. The SSD are just not meant for that type of access and when they are used in that manner they are setup with redundant backup drives because they plan for failure. Talk to anyone who builds Gaming or Multimedia rigs on a daily basis and has to deal with warrenty repairs and you will hear the same thing. I tried to think of any sistuation where you would need SSD access rate for and OS applications and frankly I couldnt think of one. Your OS files are just not taxed that hard and if they are then you need more RAM not faster HD access speed.
On the other hand you cant just move your OS files to the new drive and format the old. You can do a mirror image but you will run into conflicts later on and if your looking for sheer speed thats probly not the route you want to go. Best performance and system reliablitiy just take the time and do a clean install of Win7 if your currently running Win7 do a backup first. if not then just save your bookmarks, IM logs, Email dat files, and any other information you want to keep and start fresh. Migrations from any WinXX OS to Win7 turns to mush somewhere down the road.
You have been using cheap ass drives or have no idea what you are talking about i am not sure which yet. I have been building machines with SSD's since shortly after they released for an engineering firm. They use these computers for autocad and calculating the stresses on a structure with a given design. It has been almost 2 years and they are still up and running much faster than any SAS drives that i used before in these machines. SSD's are made to be primary drives, i get parts for an engineer at the Intel Plant here in Phoenix who does testing and research on their SSD's i can assure you that they are not half as flimsy as you think and in most tests outlasted magnetic platter drives.
@OP if you just want to format the drive the manufacturer will have free software you can burn to a bootable disk or you can download an ISO of Hiren's boot disk or UBCD and use the drive formatting utilities on them no OS required.
The difference between SSD's and hard drives in terms of life span and durability is pretty simple, an SSD has an absolute lifespan whereas a hard drive has a mean time before failure but could fail any time before or after that guess. When you look at it like this it's actually safer to use an SSD.
Each cell will last something like 100,000 writes, and generally an additional 20% of SSD space is hidden to the user, these are backup cells that automatically replace cells that die during use. For example a 64GB SSD is actually an 80GB SSD with 16GB of hidden space used specifically for redundant cell space.
I think the lifespan of an SSD is suppose to be at least 5 years under heavy use, it'd be much much longer under normal user use. Also Windows 7 detects SSD's and will treat them differently, being careful to write less temp files to them to further increase their lifespan.
Once you have OS on your main drive just go to Computer and you should see your old drive listed there ? right click > format
If it doesnt show just right click computer>manage>disk management and you should see the 2nd drive listed there, you can format and assign letter to it.
And yes main OS should no doubt go on SSD.
Grats on the Huge SSD btw! Which brand ?
Core i5 13600KF, BeQuiet Pure Loop FX 360, 32gb DDR5-6000 XPG, WD SN850 NVMe ,PNY 3090 XLR8, Asus Prime Z790-A, Lian-Li O11 PCMR case (limited ed 1045/2000), 32" LG Ultragear 4k Monitor, Logitech G560 LightSync Sound, Razer Deathadder V2 and Razer Blackwidow V3 Keyboard
Why spend 700 bones on a 265gb hard drive if the OS is just going to go on it? The OS takes up like what 20 gigs.No offence or anything just wondering. lol
Not only the OS is going to go on it. Like you said it only takes up 20 gigs.
I'll also be throwing most of my games, photoshop, video editing programs, etc. on to it.
Why would I buy a 256gb SSD and ONLY put the OS on it?
Sorry I must have missread something long the way, cough medicine is a hell of a drug. lol
Once you have OS on your main drive just go to Computer and you should see your old drive listed there ? right click > format
If it doesnt show just right click computer>manage>disk management and you should see the 2nd drive listed there, you can format and assign letter to it.
fdisk will do it. Also you can use an ubuntu OS disk to format and just choose to not install the OS. There are a bunch of programs that will do it from boot.
Whatever the drive is that you want to reformat without installing windows on it just go into My Computer right click on the drive you want to reformat and select format from the dropdown menu.
Comments
OS to ssd, that's the most important thing. Stuff about it would wear and break down are bs.
You have been using cheap ass drives or have no idea what you are talking about i am not sure which yet. I have been building machines with SSD's since shortly after they released for an engineering firm. They use these computers for autocad and calculating the stresses on a structure with a given design. It has been almost 2 years and they are still up and running much faster than any SAS drives that i used before in these machines. SSD's are made to be primary drives, i get parts for an engineer at the Intel Plant here in Phoenix who does testing and research on their SSD's i can assure you that they are not half as flimsy as you think and in most tests outlasted magnetic platter drives.
@OP if you just want to format the drive the manufacturer will have free software you can burn to a bootable disk or you can download an ISO of Hiren's boot disk or UBCD and use the drive formatting utilities on them no OS required.
The difference between SSD's and hard drives in terms of life span and durability is pretty simple, an SSD has an absolute lifespan whereas a hard drive has a mean time before failure but could fail any time before or after that guess. When you look at it like this it's actually safer to use an SSD.
Each cell will last something like 100,000 writes, and generally an additional 20% of SSD space is hidden to the user, these are backup cells that automatically replace cells that die during use. For example a 64GB SSD is actually an 80GB SSD with 16GB of hidden space used specifically for redundant cell space.
I think the lifespan of an SSD is suppose to be at least 5 years under heavy use, it'd be much much longer under normal user use. Also Windows 7 detects SSD's and will treat them differently, being careful to write less temp files to them to further increase their lifespan.
Once you have OS on your main drive just go to Computer and you should see your old drive listed there ? right click > format
If it doesnt show just right click computer>manage>disk management and you should see the 2nd drive listed there, you can format and assign letter to it.
And yes main OS should no doubt go on SSD.
Grats on the Huge SSD btw! Which brand ?
Core i5 13600KF, BeQuiet Pure Loop FX 360, 32gb DDR5-6000 XPG, WD SN850 NVMe ,PNY 3090 XLR8, Asus Prime Z790-A, Lian-Li O11 PCMR case (limited ed 1045/2000), 32" LG Ultragear 4k Monitor, Logitech G560 LightSync Sound, Razer Deathadder V2 and Razer Blackwidow V3 Keyboard
Sorry I must have missread something long the way, cough medicine is a hell of a drug. lol
Corsair P256
The Official God FAQ
fdisk will do it. Also you can use an ubuntu OS disk to format and just choose to not install the OS. There are a bunch of programs that will do it from boot.
So the question was how to format a disk without using the Windows CD, right?
Install everything on your new hdd, boot with the storage hdd attached, right click in windows and select format. Not really difficult.
Now with 57.3% more flames!
Whatever the drive is that you want to reformat without installing windows on it just go into My Computer right click on the drive you want to reformat and select format from the dropdown menu.
Haha I can't believe this thread is 4 pages.
I just spent the last few days building a water cooled rig and the only question I posted was how to reformat an HD hahaha.
New system is epic so far.
I7 920 (not OCed yet, but will) (Water Cooled in it's own loop)
Corsair Dominator RAM 6GB
ASUS P6T Deluxe V1
XFX Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition (Water Cooled in it's own loop)
Corsair P256 Solid State Drive
CPU is idling at 33C, GPU 34.
CPU at Load doesn't get above 53, GPU doesn't get above 48.
3DMark Vantage is 20500 (performance) without any overclocking at all yet.
Windows Experience rating = 7.3
Sorry for bragging, but I'm stuck waiting for a slow sound driver install and can't get into vent to run my mouth to the guildies.
The Official God FAQ
theres 2 setting to optimize in the bios if you plan to use vent type techno!
Um ya...the SSD is going to be your OS. I have never heard of SSD "burning out faster" .