to M2 or not M2?

[mslim 13]

I am running out of drive space on my rig. I have a M2 slot on my mobo as well as another hard drive tray open. I found a SAMSUNG 970 EVO M.2 2280 500GB at a price I can afford and it's only about $10-15 more expensive than an equivalent storage SSD. 

I'd like to migrate my Orbx installation over to a drive setup that would give the fastest and smoothest loading.  What's the best way to achieve this?

• Do I clone my OS and P3D install to the new M2 or
• do I use the M2 strictly for my Orbx and other scenery?

current specs:

Win7 Pro 64

·  CPU: Intel® Core™ Processor i7-6700K 4.00GHZ 8MB Intel Smart Cache LGA1151 (Skylake)

·  CPU / Processor Cooling Fan: Corsair Hydro Series H60 120mm Liquid CPU Cooling System

·  Motherboard: ASUS Z170-K ATX

·  RAM / System Memory: 16GB (8GBx2) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200

·  Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4GB GDDR5 PCIe 3.0 x16 (Maxwell)

·  Power Supply: 600 Watts - EVGA 600B 80 PLUS BRONZE Power Supply

·  Hard Drive: 512GB Samsung 850 PRO Series SATA-III 6.0Gb/s SSD

 

Edited October 28, 2020 by mslim

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

The easy thing would be to add the new SSD for Orbx / scenery.

You would probably get better performance out of using the M2 drive as your boot drive, but that is more complex to install... Your call.

[TheFamilyMan 280]

Once you see how much faster an M.2 NVMe drive performs over sata-III (6x or more), you'll wonder why you waited so long to upgrade.  That being said, Win 7 does not support NVMe without two specific patches which I think were not automatically pushed, you can read about them here: https://www.dell.com/support/article/en-us/sln300994/nvme-solid-state-drive-configuration-requirements-for-microsoft-hotfixs-kb2990941-kb3087873?lang=en. Unfortunately MS has pulled these patches, PM me if you can't find them.

BTW, installing these patches are NOT Dell specific, so don't fret about installing them.  I installed them for my now retired Win7 4770k build and was able to use a PCIe x4 installed NVMe drive without any problems or speed restrictions.  In order to use it as a boot drive I had to custom mod my bios, though that's probably not necessary with your mobo, its owner's manual should have that info.  Another issue is that you can only boot GPT formatted drives using NVMe, so if your current boot drive is MBR it'll have to be converted to GPT when re-imaged onto an NVMe drive.  There are disk partitioning tools that can do this easily, though most likely not for free.  And finally if you have everything in one giant C partition that has more than 500 GB of it used, you have to shrink that partition content somehow so it will fit on a 500GB drive.  Like Bert said...more complex to install...BTW is your head spinning yet 😄?  And finally, I found that Win7 only boots slightly faster off an NVMe than a sata-III SSD, which I admit was disappointing after all the effort I put into getting that Win7 4770K build to boot NVMe, but I overall I thought it was a really cool thing I did.

Have fun, and really, if you'll use that NVMe drive for a data drive, it is this simple:

1. Install those two patches

2. Power down and install the drive

3. Boot and use the disk manager to format it and away you go!

Edited October 28, 2020 by TheFamilyMan