How to correctly (fresh) instal Win10 on a BRAND NEW (unformatted) SSD (Kingston NVME 2TB)

IloveYouSOmuch

IloveYouSOmuch

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Hi

I currently have windows 7 on some Samsung 500 GB SSD (850 evo?)

I bought and already physically installed (additional) SSD - brand new - Kingston 2TB NVME (Kingston KC3000 2048GB, SKC3000D/2048G). I did NOT format or in any other sense "touched" the new SSD in my current windows 7 (so i dont even see it among the drives). I want to instal fresh Win 10 on this new SSD (kingston) and i want to do it "correctly".

I will be installing the windows 10 from an USB stick, with some up-to-date instalation of windows 10 that i plan to download beforehand (from my current windows 7 running system) from the microsoft website. Couple of questions:

1) Before Installing Win10 on my new Kingston SSD, i DEFINITELLY should unplug the old Samsung SSD (with current windows 7) from the motherboard SATA connector...? ( i can leave the power sata connector in place (its hard to reach))?

2) I can LEAVE all other of my HDDs (4 magnetic standard HDDs) connected during the process of Win 10 instalation on my new SSD...? (I dont see a reason why i should disconnect them, although people online sometimes say you should) (none of the 4 magnetic HDDs has or had any windows instalation on them ever)

3) The "pre-instalation" wizard of the Win 10 installer (from the USB stick) will let me format and partion the brand new untouched SSD Kingston drive before the instalation of the win 10 itself, correct? Cause the Kingston SSD is currently NOT formatted or partioned etc.
I would like to make 2 partions 1) 565 GB (give or take) for the system (C:); and secondly - 1 300 GB for my work related files (E:). I can do this from the USB stick "pre-instal wizard". Correct ? ( I do not have to format, partion or whatever the new SSD from my current windows 7 OS enviroment beforehand...?)

4) What "format" should i choose...? I assume NTFS for both partions...? What about MBR vs GPT, which one should i choose for System and Work partions...?

Thank you
 
1) Yes, unplug every other drive, leaving only the Kingston. Leaving power in is fine.

2) I recommend unplugging them too, too many times I've seen Windows installing the boot partition onto other drives which can mess things up if you need to replace them.

3) No need to format, Windows will automatically format the drive when you select the drive/partition to install during setup. Meaning you can ignore step 4.

As for MBR vs GPT, it depends on the rest of your system. If it's legacy BIOS, MBR, if it's UEFI then GPT. If UEFI, make sure it's booting to the USB as UEFI (eg should be called UEFI:USB, will vary between motherboard OEMs).
 
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Thank you - I'm planning to do something similar. After it's installed, if I plug in my old SSD, assume I need to do a full format to avoid having two connected drives with Windows? Can I just 'delete' anything instead?

My aim would be to (try) and re-use the product key with the windows on the existing SSD as well. Any guidance on how to do that?
 
Sudden said:
Thank you - I'm planning to do something similar. After it's installed, if I plug in my old SSD, assume I need to do a full format to avoid having two connected drives with Windows? Can I just 'delete' anything instead?

My aim would be to (try) and re-use the product key with the windows on the existing SSD as well. Any guidance on how to do that?
Click to expand...
You don't need to format the other drive but I would go into disk management to delete the boot partition on that drive if you don't want to access that copy of Windows any more.

If Windows 10/11, during the installation when it asks for the product key, just skip. Once its set up and booted to desktop, as soon as it connects to the internet Microsoft will realise the PC already had a valid licence and will auto activate.
 
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BTW i have a new SSD drive that i will be installing windows 10 on. Its not formatted yet. Im planning to format/partition the C system partition to approximately 565 GB. Im planning to have Windows 10 and my programs on that drive, nothing else... 565 GB should be plenty enough space for this ussage (system+programs), correct?

Also, i know that each memory "cell" of an SSD has limited times you can write to it, before it goes bad (dead)... AFIK ssds have some function that ensures that each new byte of data is written to a new cell, that way, every cell of the SSD is written to, before any old one is overwritten. This basically distributes the written data EQUALLY all over the SSD (in order to prolong the life of the ssd). My question is simple - does this even/uniform/equal distribution of data all over the SSD respect partitioning...? If i create a partition that has only 50 GB for example (or those 565 GB of mine, but lets take an example of 50GB). And i write and overwrite the 50GB again and again and again... Are those 50 GB still distributed all over the drive, or basically are those 50GB written in particular small part of the SSD only and thus those memory cells degrade fruther and further (and much faster than the rest of the drive)...
My hope is that this uniform data distribution ignores the partitions and writes the data still uniformly all over the drive... Correct...?
 
565gb is more than enough for Windows and a few apps. Minimum I would recommend is 120gb.

Yes, it doesn't matter if you're hammering 1 partition, TRIM will still do its job in making sure the entire SSD is wear down evenly.
 
Thank you

I currently have like 6 years old Instalation of Windows 7 (never re-installed during that time) with various programs i installed during the 6 years (standard C:\ letter partition) and it takes 219 GB of space... So even with new programs i plan to instal, those 565 GB of a new partition should be enough.
 
Use WizTree or Space Sniffer to find what is taking up so much space, 219GB is a lot of space consumed (unless you have various games still installed). Remember, old game uninstalls will often leave game data behind taking up multiple GBs of space if you've never even thought about it after uninstalling stuff in the past.

I made this post on reddit recently and was surprised at how many people found tens to hundreds of GB of used up space from games and stuff left behind after uninstalling them in the past.

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com www.reddit.com


Orcvader said:
565gb is more than enough for Windows and a few apps. Minimum I would recommend is 120gb.

Yes, it doesn't matter if you're hammering 1 partition, TRIM will still do its job in making sure the entire SSD is wear down evenly.
Click to expand...

Remember that Windows will allocate pagefile space in the capacity range of 1.5x installed RAM, so whilst such a small SSD would be fine technically, in practice if someone has say a few games installed, and has 32GB RAM, then Windows will be setting aside 48GB of disk space for a system managed pagefile. So what would need to be done is changing the pagefile to a fixed manual size for min/max which is derived from observing what the maximum commit is after a long usage session. From experience, the average user won't need a pagefile larger than say 6GB if they have 16-32GB of RAM, those that need more will be on really low system resources anyway and doing more than what the system is able to manage in terms of resources.
 
mrk said:
Use WizTree or Space Sniffer to find what is taking up so much space, 219GB is a lot of space consumed (unless you have various games still installed). Remember, old game uninstalls will often leave game data behind taking up multiple GBs of space if you've never even thought about it after uninstalling stuff in the past.

I made this post on reddit recently and was surprised at how many people found tens to hundreds of GB of used up space from games and stuff left behind after uninstalling them in the past.

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com www.reddit.com



Remember that Windows will allocate pagefile space in the capacity range of 1.5x installed RAM, so whilst such a small SSD would be fine technically, in practice if someone has say a few games installed, and has 32GB RAM, then Windows will be setting aside 48GB of disk space for a system managed pagefile. So what would need to be done is changing the pagefile to a fixed manual size for min/max which is derived from observing what the maximum commit is after a long usage session. From experience, the average user won't need a pagefile larger than say 6GB if they have 16-32GB of RAM, those that need more will be on really low system resources anyway and doing more than what the system is able to manage in terms of resources.
Click to expand...

I have never installed games on my system drive... only programs. I currently have 48 GB Ram (installed 32 GB modules like 2 weeks ago).

Is 219 GB really a lot for windows 7 (6 years old instal)...?

(I will be be deleting/formating this old drive with Windows 7 neverthless.... The windows 10 is comming onto a brand new Kingston NVME KC 3000 2 TB SSD... The old Samsung Evo (750?, 850?) 500 GB SSD (which currently houses the windows 7) will be formatted and used as a gaming SSD :-) (for games only) in the new system.
 
Put it this way, my Windows install has not had a "clean" install since Vista, I have been in-place upgrading since Vista (bypassing Windows 8 because 8 was toilet), and here is what my C drive looks like right now:

2sSt92y.png

So 388GB used, but 325GB of that is taken up by my Lightroom catalog files and 2 installed games on Steam. if your install is over 200GB right now then I would say yes, you do have remnant stuff you could scan and clear out, unless you are like me and also have a substantial Lightroom catalogue since you don't have games installed.
 
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I took a screenshoot, everything seems rather ok i would say, but the biggest "dudes" in the room by far are these, i took a screenshoot:

prnt.sc

Screenshot

Captured with Lightshot
prnt.sc prnt.sc

I dont even know what "hibernation is" i just shut down my pc everytime, i dont think i ever used hibernation, not even by accident... (?).
So afaik, i can delete the hiberfil.sys file correct?
 
Ah so that explains a lot then!

Your pagefile is needlessly massive. Windows still uses the now ancient methodology of assigning up to 1.5x your RAM as virtual memory, so you end up with a massive pagefile which will never get utilised. For this reason alone I stopped letting Windows manage the pagefile back when I had just 32GB RAM, with 64GB of RAM I found that 0% pagefile was actually being used even through heavy editing sessions, so I manually fixed it to 2GB min and max and to this day still, 0% actually used because there's more than enough RAM even when Lightroom or Photoshop consume up to 28GB of RAM alone. I would suggest doing this too, just look at your virtual memory commit peak and set the min/max to that peak, if it's anything like mine, then your peak will be under 2GB too through the heaviest of sessions so you can safely set the PF min/max to 2GB say.

The pagefile needs to /exist/ as some apps look for it, even if they don't use it. It's again one of those legacy things, and 2GB is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

The idea of having the pagefile be 1.5x the RAM is so that in the event of a crash, then Windows can memory dump everything to disk before it restarts the machine (default action unless you've disabled auto restart on BSOD). This is not necessary if your machine never crashes and you've no need to troubleshoot, and you end up just wasting SSD space to something that will never be used. Windows is much more stable nowadays anyway compared to the early days when this was common practice.

The hiberfile is because you have Hibernation enabled in Windows. Turn it off and the hiberfile will vanish freeing up all that space.

learn.microsoft.com

How to disable and re-enable hibernation - Windows Client

Explains how to turn off the hibernation feature in Windows.
learn.microsoft.com
 
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