SSD questions

Orange are the SATA data cables. The cable with the braided cover is power.

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Will all the drives need power connections?

for ssd drives yes, same as the HDD drive, but if you look along that braided cable there may be more power plugs on it, as for what the other sata goes to, cant really think of anything that it could be except other drives

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Any device you wish to use will need power, yes.
@tempusmurphy may be correct, it is possible there are more power plugs tucked away on the length of that cable.

Edit: Here is a sample image.


The six pin connector (bottom center) is what goes to the power supply (if you have a modular one, otherwise it’s connected inside the power supply) and then there are three SATA power plugs on this one. I think three is more common, but sometimes they have four.

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Do you have any card reader dock or something similar? In my system I have a multiple cardreader and USB plug 3.5 inch bay module. It uses USB, SATA power and SATA connections.
Check what is in the other end of the mystery SATA cable.

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This I just posted might be helpful to you, at least to avoid the pitfalls I stumpled into.

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I will buy the drives and then have a look at what cables I have when I take the other case side off :blush:

No, nothing else in there… I’ll have a look when I take the side off. It may just be a spare cable? I had this system made up for me so I’m intrigued to know what it is lol

Should I wipe my current HDD, then install the new SSD’s, start up the PC and install win10 from the flash drive? Will it confuse things if I keep the windows installation on the old HDD?

It shouldnt matter
as long as you keep the C drive in the same sata slot. You should be able to just plug in the new SSD drive and the pc will just see them as drive d or e, at present I am up to drive g… lol

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shouldn’t be necessary. It should ask you from which drive you want to boot if it finds more than one install.

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Yeah, it sounds like a spare cable.

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So I can leave the original HDD as it is for now with Windows installed on it then install it again on the new SSD? Then wiping the HDD? This has me confused lol…

Have you backed up everything that you need to keep from the old hdd?
Personally i would recommend keeping the old hdd intact until you have the new ssd’s up and running.
You could keep it in the box but unplugged.

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it depends what you want the new ssd for, and how big it is. if you want it for windows then scrub the hdd and go for a fresh install on the ssd, if you just want to put dcs or games on it, then leave the original hdd in with windows alone and just plug in the ssd it will just show up as another drive

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Good idea! I don’t need anything keeping on the HDD, I’ll reinstall from scratch anything I need.

How big is the ssd drive ?

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Okay, that’s another option and less stress…
I was going to get a 480Gb one for DCS etc and a 240Gb one for a Windows install then have my original 2Tb HDD for Steam games…

Keep in mind that if you do a fresh Windows 10 install you will also have to reinstall your programs and games and you need to make backups of them to keep their current state.

You can shorten install time for some of the stuff by copying the folders from your current hdd to the ssd’s Steam games and DCS World as they check for files present.

I would personally atempt a migrate OS first and then go for the fresh install if that is not working.
Unless you want the clean slate a fresh install brings of course.

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Thats pretty much the set up I have, except I have 2x 240gb and the dcs one is getting a bit full at about 170gb used.

as @DanTDBV said see if you can migrate windows across to the new ssd, personally I have never tried this. I just went for new installs, starting from scratch.

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